OUTLIVING CHILDREN (acknowledging that the Earth is one of this Universe's children)

OUTLIVING CHILDREN (acknowledging that Earth is one of this Universe's Children)

Very sad indeed for parents to outlive their children.; Something happens to the generations that should not. My paternal grandmother outlived most of her ten children, and for a while, it looked as if my mother might outlive her only child. Fortunately for her, i'm still here alive and ready to try to accomplish more than ever (ideally driving). If not, there are other ways to assert a meaningful presence. For me: limited fork ways.

With all the (rather frequent) tornadic events in the US in 2012, such outliving must be more common, if not more natural. Wars contribute to this dreadful phenomenon --pur DNA supports conflict, or we'd have evolved without it. I feel like adding my tears to buckets and barrels of tears --not that my additional tears would help anything, but I still crave such addition --some form of math seems involved, so far, with everything, not that human forms of math are the best or only forms, but as part of humanity, I will continue to submit to them. I must rely, as I've always done, on human senses, the only senses I have --even humanity's instruments improve what humanity can see, hear, touch, etc. I need an equation for tears, but when I add tears, I just get more tears. I do fear that there might not be enough fresh water (or food for populations of Earth, and I do not feel that humans are not more deserving of food just for being human --I doubt that, were other animals in charge, the Earth would be experiencing this decline this fast --some of my assumptions surely show here), and tears tend to be incredibly fresh when produced, so my tears --they aren't too salty to be fresh-- can add a minuscule amount. I can't cry enough for everything. And looping bifurcating systems may not offer enough to constitute salvation --even if all possible loops are formed. Million of forks, for no reason but to make art that possibly no sentient one will see. Not that humanity's seeing it makes it any more splendid (note the assumption of splendor --humanity's Hubble space telescope did not make things easier for me; increased, actually, an accessible amount of splendor.

A time may come when dependence on tears could make a life/death difference --not necessarily a splendid difference.

I definitely do not wish to outlive my son. He must go on to live a full life, one that rewards him with joy (however he eventually defines joy). what successes, generations --if the world lasts long enough. I am optimistic that the Earth will/can endure. For my son, and sons of my sons. Surely, I hope long enough for his life to matter to more people than me. But then again, I am not promoting an afterlife such as what I was taught about so long ago. My mother still insists that her Christian beliefs are the correct beliefs. But I think that what is thought to be known (what I've been taught, and what I've observed at planetariums and through telescopes [I've been ruined, it seems, by Hubble]) about the universe and the solar system cause me to doubt her beliefs. She tells me that the prayer chains she initiated while I was hospitalized affected my outcome --I cannot say with certitude that all that praying did not help, but I wonder about what happens to the body; decomposition seems quite likely to me. Houdini did not return, and I believe that he would have had return been possible. Humanity's atoms may become available for next forms of life, assuming Earth can continue to sustain life as we've known it --not because we have dominion over other lifeforms, but because

I hope we have a chance to improve the earth (assumption that improvement is needed: noted), to try to return it to some of what it was like during days before greed --that benefitted a few, not everyone-- helped to deplete the planet of finite resources. I do not think that we have suffered through all that will have to be endured before planetary decline can be halted or, better, reversed. Maybe it's too late for reversals. Maybe humanity does not deserve reversals. But I also don't want belief systems of humanity to perish --all that believing must not have been for naught. Surely. I don't want human generations to have an abrupt ending, but such an ending may be inevitable. There is interconnectedness among species. As insects and amphibians, for instance, meet demise, lifeforms dependent on those insects and amphibians may perish from those extinctions. Not to mention possibilities of asteroids and comets that may have deposited building blocks of life on Earth --comet Gods, I guess.

I'm not sure how my grandmother coped with being here after so many of her progeny (she had ten children, outlived all but three) were gone, returned to earth her husband tilled for so many years. A southern farmer. She outlived him too. I used to play with their geese, many of which were as tall as I was. He was dead already; never knew him except for what survived in my father and what was passed on to me through him. I've passed along some of what I received genetically to my son. Half. Lately, I've been impressed that everyone alive now has roots that extend to the first people on this planet. This seems to offer a truth no matter what is believed, creationism or evolution --of course, I thought that Darwin also offered a truth, seriously questioned by the Scopes Monkey Trial --in Tennessee, of course, where my father grew up and met my mother who now rejects everything I was taught in Cleveland, Ohio public schools, but not what I was taught in Sunday school. She is converting the garage into a church (it is not going to become the dolphin tank that my father promised, except in dreams and imagination that would not be mine had he not made the promise). My mother was always with me while my father stayed home, often on the second floor porch, watching, once, me by his side, a funnel cloud form above the church just a few yards away. True Vine. My son was not raised in church as I was; he was raised more to be a free thinker, encouraged to form his own ideas based on what made the most sense to him, and it is not organized religions. This exclusion from church has helped him rely more on logic --another human invention. How can humans not rely on human knowledge systems? Are we not surrounded by what humanity has made, whether for the detriment (according to someone's assessment) or improvement (according to someone's assessment) of human lives? Are we not primarily concerned with what may happen to people? Animals primarily as pets and food --for humans? I think of zoos, though I've visited many, as comparable to what happened in slavery, the captures that separated families --when animals are captured (I won't even talk about what happens to animals raised to be human food --no other purpose, the most noble purpose, according to Babe, book by Dick King-Smith, screenplay by George Miller and Chris Noonan --I do eat meat, the sanitized [relatively] forms purchased in supermarkets, relying on others to do the killing and butchering and packaging for me. I do like tastes of meat, and I do experience misgivings about being the carnivore I am, criticizing no carnivore for their carnivore ways --that I share). There is hypocrisy here --how can there not be? I am human-- I've admitted to eating meat, but I've rejected organized religions (many of which restrict the eating of meat to certain animals under certain conditions [of preparation] without outright prohibiting such consumption). I do not know all of what Buddhism teaches about the eating (or the not-eating) of meat, (go here http://mingkok.buddhistdoor.com/en/news/d/18354 for more info), but I reason that we should, even thinking of limited fork tenets, show more compassion toward other animals to whom this planet belongs just as much as to humans. I don't accept biblical teachings of humanity's dominion over other animals or over the world --planet. Exceedingly difficult for me to do that. Other animals may not have been as destructive as humans have been. I seem to take more outrage against those who are not free- thinkers than against carnivores; perhaps because I also think that meat-eating free- thinkers may have reasoned that eating meat is acceptable --I am from a family of carnivores, the human family as well as my personal family (my son was vegetarian until ninth grade and a field trip to Chicago where he ate a burger for the first time).

I don't know whether or not the sacrifice of the cow entered his mind (he is a member of Mensa --not that that membership means he is more or less likely to eat meat; he's also a member of the human family, and, as I've said, we haven't performed particularly well, given our responsibility for the planet --we are the planet's [self-appointed --made in God's image, according to many, including my mother] caretakers). A willing or forced sacrifice? What do we know or understand about cowness? How many of use have really tried to listen to what cows or other animals (including humans) might have to say? Does this understanding or lack of understanding really matter? As humanity runs out of what humanity, in any of its forms, considers food, perhaps this (and similar questions) will be answered. It doesn't really matter which questions are raised or attempted to be answered according to human ways of processing information --biblical or otherwise acquired-- ways of determining which questions to ask in search of a truth accepted by all with liberty and justice-- hmm; I've heard that before. Even had to recite that daily to get the "A" that I wanted (from the Declaration of Independence --not a declaration of free-thinking). 

Take a look at "Outliving Children."

Lucretius of puddle wow!

This is what Thylias Moss had to say about, in a nutshell, existence as a collaborative venture, about a shallow puddle being able to reflect the depth of an atmospheric ocean, about a partnership between compression and expansion, each taking the other into itself apparently simultaneously, perception determining which parameter dominates --the partnership is a flaw perhaps, an accident perhaps, my own weakness for the idea, but it functions well (my perception) as a source, somehow, of possibility:

POET'S PICK APRIL 5
Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
Selected by Thylias Moss
National Poetry Month 2007


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Thylias Moss's Poetry Month Pick, April 4, 2007
from On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), Book One
(with some reference in my comment to a passage in Book four)
by Lucretius (c. 99 - c. 55 BCE)
as translated by Anthony M. Esolen

Now it's clear that nothing can be limited
Without something beyond for boundary, some
Point beyond which our sense can't follow it.
But you must admit that nothing exists beyond
This All; therefore it has no limit, no end.
Nor does it matter in what place you stand:
Take any point you like—you leave the whole
Unbounded in all regions equally.


A few lines later, this comes:

…I’ll follow you then; wherever
You place the shores, I ask, "What of the spear?
Where does it fly?" No end can be established;
Immensity prolongs the flight forever.


A passage that has followed, as has the other, this:


There's more: Nature dissolves all things into
Their atoms; things can't die back down to nothing.
…Never can things revert to nothingness!




Thylias Moss Comments:

How tempting to believe in innovation, in the poet making something new—I have needed this delusion myself, have in fact built something I dare call a "new literary paradigm" on the possibility of the new, yet one of the ancients had already made clear (in Latin) that "as all words share one alphabet, many things may be made from the same atoms," must be made from the same particles, hinting at some irreducible particle that exists in a finite number of basic forms, these combining to make all else, infinite variety within limits established by the nature of these particles, so human beings will not (in initial birth form) become an Andean peak or a pack of flamingos dancing in one of the rivers, perhaps a sulfurous one, at the feet of the Andes though some humans may do an

Irish step dance in which the legwork seems to invent the flamingo ritual pack dance again—could it be that certain patterns are inevitable given the close relationship between all stuff? We're made of elements repeating throughout an immensity available on every scale, Lucretius instructing his readers to venture to the shore, to the limit of existence and from that shore to throw a spear that will still travel away from the thrower, will still

have somewhere to go, every somewhere a candidate for the center in a totality that is necessarily endless if it is indeed an all, and if endless, then centerless, as much space in every direction from every point. Wow. And looking, he says, into a puddle seemingly shallow gives access to a depth, to an infinity as immense as the celestial one that the puddle is able to hold. Wow2 (superscript in the original message) and Wow2 (subscript in the original message).

So beginning with any of these points, taking any point as a nucleus, and increasing distance from it while maintaining that speck as the center, eventually, the periphery embraces totality. And that is the powers of ten, an Eames film I saw in Chicago, the stills from the film that I have as a flipbook, the book about the size of things in the universe that I have taught when I invented a literary theory that caused me to seek that which could give my new point credence. I have reinvented something ancient, it turns out. I participate in one of the inevitable patterns, am part of a chain of observing the limits and joys of the senses, the logic and marvels suggested by

consideration of scale. And I am comforted by Lucretius' love of what I consider lovable paradox, to be both bound and unbound, both finite and limitless. And I am comforted by Lucretius saying that recycling is the nature of things, not waste. There is no throwaway stuff (including ancient texts—how I need Lucretius!) for stuff breaks down into basic units that are then free to form something else, to be part of something else that can also be the center of everything, and by extension, exist in some form for as long as there is totality, as long as there is existence as both the container and the content.

This is how to live, and it has been the way to live at least since Lucretius. From the center where I (re)configure a way to make whatever forms are possible out of various components; from this center, I arrive at a totality that as it widens away from my ideas embraces Lucretius, his part larger for being wider—but my idea therefore a
candidate for potency, for being a distillation: a potent drop at a present end of the funnel. I cannot resist another Wow!



About Thylias Moss:
Thylias Moss is the author of eight previous volumes of poetry. Her Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler was a National Critics Book Circle Award finalist, and was named by the Village Voice as one of "Our Favorite Books of 1998." A 1996 Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation and a recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, Moss has received grants from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Kenan Charitable Trust. She is Professor of English and Art & Design at the University of Michigan.


Don't forget! If you enjoy our regular features and special events like this one, please join Thylias Moss in supporting Poetry Daily by making a tax-deductible contribution.

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Here's another take on Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler:

Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler
by Thylias Moss
(Persea Books: 1998) Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler is Thylias Moss's sixth book, her first after grabbing one of the MacArthur genius grants. Her work has changed -- moved further out, encyclopedia-ized. She has memories of playing jacks sans hands, Thalidomide-esque, but all it is is nose-sucking, all it is is the end of the world. The Brothers Grimm, Zora Neale Hurston, Amy Clampitt, Stanley Crouch: this is a thin volume, but spectacularly dense, provocative (is her cheating poem about Lazurus “cheating” death? or her and her husband's affairs?). To read her Susan Smith / baptizing poem is to be horrified -- yet, as Moss posits, 'tis poetry's job. The long, more formal open-field works, particulately “Advice,” “Sour Milk,” and the title poem, all break new ground. I want the book! I want the movie! paperback

          Bob Holman

And here's an opportunity to view without leaving this page, flamingos and Irish step dancers in parallel movement in proximity:





(I'm relying on movement clips available on you tube though had flamingos and Irish steppers been filmed to show the parallels, similarities would be more intense courtesy the exaggeration that accompanies focus --even so, groundwork, the root of the link is here.)
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It is possibility that I want, and it is possible for me to imagine as many possibilities as I'd like to

--each one a tine of a limited fork, each one also a negative tine, the space between prongs, of a limited fork. Yes, this fork in my hand --further limited for the interaction and collaboration with my hand to access, at best, part of something itself part of something;

the fork that my arm extends by holding it, part of the system of limited fork access; I grasp what grasps. Pasta winds around the prongs, white ropes. I remember my mother wringing white sheets into twists that become, I'm sure of this, the twists of a white turban, an albino hive from which I'd have to extract a very funny honey --I assume that I could not resist extracting that strange, so even more desirable honey, any more than I could resist this movement, this journey from the winding of pasta to rare honey, a destination
becoming inevitable for honey in this nutshell (there are others simultaneously) being cracked here. It happened with socks in The Monday Aardvark of Laundry, and the following video is honey extracted from the larger hive of a poem that, like the universe it is, admits to containing what it contains, some glorious spots, some in danger, threatened and threatening, stable and unstable, the range of real. The structure holds, however briefly, but these junctures happened; the pasta, turban, hive formed something my mind could hold and nurture --that structure ever holds for any amount of time on any scale in any location, though this happens every moment, the moment itself a structure held and holding, amazes and delights me --what does this study of interacting systemsalso reveal? A dependency on delight (perhaps why there is, as
Joel Brouwer puts it in his review, an "allergy to editing," which happens, which is inevitable, Joel, erosion, variables and forces that nudge stable systems toward instability, unstable systems towards instability. While this dies, this thrives. Multiple locations of simultaneous activity [not synchronized necessarily]. That is the footprint of a landscape of existence. A landscape to which I hope to be true (as I perceive that, perceptions updated as often as I become aware that updates are necessary, though probably not often enough). Here is a model of a landscape of existence worth trying: John Conways' Game of Life).




Some of the mappings of the Tarzan Holler, of the Tokyo Butter can be (forms of) brutal, won't avail themselves of a certain kind of denial, do not boost certain kinds of reputation above attempts to perceive better the irregularities and all, her own too, the ordered messiness of movement, of existence that seems to be going somewhere, a point of movement, a rejection of pointlessness, mindless wandering (the mind indeed! --please, if you have a mind to, refer to My Neurological Winter).






- Posted using BlogPress from my Limited Forked iPad

Location:Everywhere in the universe!

Hungry

I'm very hungry, so I should get something to eat -- but what?
Some snails? escargot in French.

How about some grits? Or some frog legs?

Maybe it's just info that I crave, some definitive info --don't know where to get that. however.


I'm a litte worried too --not about limited on my time; everyone and everything that exists so far has those, but I do wonder how long any go this will last before a new cycle of existence begins, perhaps to dominate. Will there ever be (in my time here) contact with nearby universes, a way to eat from other gardens acquiring tastes for what grows there easily and in sufficient quantity to help this planet's problems with sufficient foodstuff and clean water for all!

The End Times
(maybe --I hope not, however)

perhaps now is the time to allow this blogs to become the cookbook, in part, that it can be. Maybe some food experiments could be right. Maybe real (no offense intended) top-of-the-foodchain chefs will offer some suggestions (then again, I assume much, as I must --to be a good citizen of whatever I'm a good citizen of).

It will soon be time here for dinner, and I am not prepared --How nice it would be to eat and be done with that, for all of my remaining time alive, but hunger will return like a stray animal I took in, hoping it would return, but a bit sad that it did come back, and I lack the capacity to condemn the animal (that was once invited) to a certain death (though being part of life already condemns what is a part of what we think we know).

i don't really know what is means to be here, but I'm here anyway --and I've worked hard to remain connected to this world without my having to address at all why I was not taken permanently (yet), joining my father and the billions who have already left, many in pre-biblecal times so without any planned restoration of life, no everlasting anything --we may not even be right about time which is not universal --whose time should be held as model?

No answers, no answers

here (or on any of my plates)....

Please come over: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Dinner Game, Dinner for Schmucks, Dinner Rush, My Dinner with Andre, Dinner at Eight, Happy Birthday to everyone.

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WELCOME TO A MOXIE SUPPER!

100% fat-free ideas served to you for free! on the moxie supper plan from the Gray Matter Kitchen

If you're tired of tasteless ideas that fill you with empty mental calories unable to satisfy your cravings for more complex thinking that won't turn to brain flab; if you secretly crave more dimensions to meanings that may or may not prove impossible well beyond current limits on lifespan, meanings that can be part alternative and part antidote to catchy pop refrains and marketing jingles that are often like sonic roaches, then take the moxie supper path to the moxie supper diet that allows you to gain mental weight while sloughing some flab of superficiality.

A video Appetizer from a gray matter kitchen:


An unfinished (active) moxie supper path map —waiting for additions, adjustments, extensions:


Bon Appétit!

(from the preface to the current daily new edition of the ideology cookbook and guide to jungian and freudian late-night psychological snack cake: award-wining sponge, angel, and devil's food recipes)