Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

This poem was a gift from my new acquaintance and now facebook friend, Kinsley Koons. She recommends reading it every day, and I agree.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

my time back

I jumped from the sky
landed with a melody
in a body surprised
it fits
naturally

taking a break from the internet. see you march 1st.

Song of Fairies Robbing an Orchard

painting by Benjamin Robert Haydon

Song of Fairies Robbing an Orchard

- Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)

We, the Fairies, blithe and antic,
Of dimensions not gigantic,
Though the moonshine mostly keep us,
Oft in orchards frisk and peep us.

Stolen sweets are always sweeter,
Stolen kisses much completer,
Stolen looks are nice in chapels,
Stolen, stolen, be your apples.

When to bed the world are bobbing,
Then's the time for orchard-robbing;
Yet the fruit were scarce worth peeling,
Were it not for stealing, stealing.

A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace...

Orson Scott Card (An excerpt from the beginning of chapter 16)

A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of the story, but a friend of mine, a speaker for the dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.)

The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. "Is there anyone here," he says to them, "who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?" 

They murmur and say, "We all know the desire. But, Rabbi none of us are acted on it." 

The rabbi says, "Than kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong." He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, "Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he'll know I am his loyal servant."

So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder. Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, "Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the fist stone." 

The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins, Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I'll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated. 

As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman's head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestones. 

"Nor am I without sin," he says to the people. "But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it." 

So he woman died because her community was too rigid too endure her deviance. 

The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him. 

Dan Barber: A surprising parable of foie gras

We had a thanksgiving potluck

It was a good thing to do on a Saturday. About thirty people came, brought food, and drank six pots of coffee. Xac Denton captured the music for YouTube.

No One Conquered Wyoming


Good Women - Travis Chaney


Mason Jennings - cover by No One Conquered Wyoming


A Protest Song - Travis Chaney


the whole show

until the soft and precious metal of our will boiled off in vapor

To The Reader

- Charles Baudelaire

Infatuation, sadism, lust, avarice
possess our souls and drain the body's force;
we spoonfeed our adorable remorse,
like whores or beggars nourishing their lice.

Our sins are mulish, our confessions lies;
we play to the grandstand with our promises,
we pray for tears to wash our filthiness;
importantly pissing hogwash through our styes.

The devil, watching by our sickbeds, hissed
old smut and folk-songs to our soul, until
the soft and precious metal of our will
boiled off in vapor for this scientist.

Each day his flattery makes us eat a toad,
and each step forward is a step to hell,
unmoved, through previous corpses and their smell
asphyxiate our progress on this road.

Like the poor lush who cannot satisfy,
we try to force our sex with counterfeits,
die drooling on the deliquescent tits,
mouthing the rotten orange we suck dry.

Gangs of demons are boozing in our brain —
ranked, swarming, like a million warrior-ants,
they drown and choke the cistern of our wants;
each time we breathe, we tear our lungs with pain.

If poison, arson, sex, narcotics, knives
have not yet ruined us and stitched their quick,
loud patterns on the canvas of our lives,
it is because our souls are still too sick.

Among the vermin, jackals, panthers, lice,
gorillas and tarantulas that suck
and snatch and scratch and defecate and fuck
in the disorderly circus of our vice,

there's one more ugly and abortive birth.
It makes no gestures, never beats its breast,
yet it would murder for a moment's rest,
and willingly annihilate the earth.

It's BOREDOM. Tears have glued its eyes together.
You know it well, my Reader. This obscene
beast chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine —
you — hypocrite Reader — my double — my brother!

(other translations here)

Know Thyself

by Alexander Pope

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast,
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such
Whether he thinks too little or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

"sainthood... a thing human beings should avoid"

"To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes it clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife and child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and that Gandhi--with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction--always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must be, he says, some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is, perhaps, a nobel one, but in the sense in which--I think--most people would give the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is in the end prepared to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol and tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint should avoid, but sainthood is also a thing human beings should avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that "non-attachment" is not only better than a full acceptance of the earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. "

-- George Orwell in his "Reflections on Gandhi"

A poem by Josh and Jessica

Last night a strange fire burnt all the worlds money
Today we had nothing responsible to do
We spent the day up in the trees playing music, and resting in its echoes.
We were all our favorite animals
We all died and didn't mind
We were no longer just two lonely people
The ocean let us through, and we were free to roam together as we pleased

they didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal

From Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles"

- The captain nodded. "Tell me about [the] civilization here," he said, waving his hand at the mountain towns.
- "They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's that mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at lease we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion.
- "We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was nor more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us an answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people."
- "And the Martians are a found people? inquired the captain.
- "yes. They knew how to combine science and religion so the two worked side by side, neither denying the other, each enriching the other."
- "That sounds ideal."
- "It was. I'd like to show you how the Martians did it."
- "My men are waiting."
- "We'll be gone half an hour. Tell them that, sir."
- The captain hesitated, then rose and called an order down the hill. 

- Spender led him over into a little Martian village built all of cool perfect marble. There were great friezes of beautiful animals, white-limbed cat things and yellow-limbed sun symbols, and statues of bull-like creatures and statues of men and women and huge fine-featured dogs."

- "There's your answer, Captain."
- "I don't see."
- "The Martians discovered the secret of life among animals. The animal doesn't not question life. It lives. Its very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life. You see-the statuary, the animals symbols, again and again."
- "It looks pagan."
- "On the contrary, those are God symbols, symbols of life. Man had become too much man and not enough animal on Mars too. And the men of Mars realized that in order to survive they would have to forgo asking that one question any longer: Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible. The Martians realize that they asked the question 'Why live at all?" at the height of some period of war and despair, when there was no answer. But once the civilization calmed, quieted, and wars ceased, the question became senseless in a new way. Life was now good and needed no arguments."
- "It sounds as if the Martians were quite naive."
- "Only when it paid to be naive..."

the fairies still don't know why they were blamed

Your bodily soul wants comforting.
The severe father wants spiritual clarity. -- Rumi

Two young women came upon a garden. Even at the first glance they could tell this garden held more interest, and held more enjoyable experiences then they could hope for in two or even three lifetimes. After a short discussion about what their parents would think they decided that they wanted to spend the rest of their lives enjoying the plants and tending to the garden. After several years they become master gardeners. There where difficulties but they had each other, and by this time several other gardeners had joined them.

One day the two women are talking about how much they enjoyed the garden when their beautiful friendship meant a very sad ending.
-- "I love how beautifully everything works together when it is properly tended."
-- "Me too. I really enjoy the fairies. They really make it worth it."
-- "I'm sorry, what fairies?"
-- "You know the fairies that clean the signs that lead to the garden. They also sing, and tell us how much they enjoy our work."
-- "I'm sorry, but I still don't know what you are talking about. Perhaps it isn't as important that we both see fairies, but that we both see the garden?"
-- "You don't know what I'm talking about? How can you say you love me? I need to be with people who also love fairies. I've found someone who loves fairies."

After that day the two friends never spoke again. The fairies still don't know why they were blamed for the sad ending.

a merry life and a short one

"In an honest service, there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labour; in this, plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not ballance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sower look or two at choking. No, a merry life and a short one shall be my motto." -- Captain Bartholomew Roberts

dark and meaningless catacombs of learning

The Tree of Knowledge System ...depicts knowledge as consisting of four levels or dimensions of complexity (Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture) that correspond to the behavior of four classes of objects (material objects, organisms, animals, and humans), and four classes of science (physical, biological, psychological, and social). Each dimension of complexity is connected to the dimension beneath it via a theoretical "joint point." A joint point provides the causal explanatory framework on how the dimension of complexity evolved. For example, the modern synthesis (which is Darwin's theory of natural selection operating on genetic combinations through time) offers the conceptual framework for the evolution of life. A major and novel feature of the ToK System is the proposition that there are four such fundamental joint points and, correspondingly, four dimensions of complexity. Ultimately, the ToK System is a proposal for the theoretical unification of scientific knowledge

In this time of divisive tendencies within and between the nations, races, religions, sciences and humanities, synthesis must become the great magnet which orients us all…

"[Yet] scientists have not done what is possible toward integrating bodies of knowledge created by science into a unified interpretation of man, his place in nature, and his potentialities for creating the good society. Instead, they are entombing us in dark and meaningless catacombs of learning." -- Oliver Reiser

More on the Tree of Knowledge System