A Musing of the Last Retard from Atlantis.

Dog Poet Transmitting…….

Corruption can be a hard thing to compute. People on the sidelines, with an exaggerated idea of their own integrity and fortitude often imagine that they would be immune to the conditions that made the one they are observing such poor examples of what we ought to be… into what we should not be but… corruption is a lasting, cycling, looping and permanent expression in Nature and in ourselves and yes… ‘cycling’ and ‘looping’, in juxtaposition, is (or are) a redundancy. Not to notice that corruption is a permanency in all cycles and loops is a hallmark and trademark of the whole affair and let us not have to make a point of ‘hallmarks’ and ‘trademarks’ as we already have with ‘loops’ and ‘cycles’. I suppose one could say, “shit happens” and you may be sure that ‘shit’ is a part of the equation as well and a definite statement on the concept of corruption.

It is true that I take the long way around more often than not but… I suspect the reader would not be pleased if I took the short route. After all… the journey is the point. Once you get wherever it is you arrive at, well… there you are, aren’t you?

In better times, which this is not an example of… corruption is not the larger feature of the movie. There are always dragons to slay but I will venture that a visible dragon, no matter how large, is a far easier kill than an invisible or misidentified dragon. Logically, external beasts are much easier destroyed or taught to dance than internal beasts and that is what brings us, at this point in the posting to the reasons why and how people become corrupted and why people on the sidelines imagine that they themselves would never wind up the same way.

It is true that I am critical of many things. The sheer weight of words that flow from this fountain make it impossible for the source of them to avoid contradiction and at least the appearance of hypocrisy. Never think the source is unaware of this. It just comes with the territory. We know about the weight of feathers on the scale. We have heard of Aristophanes and Sophocles …but we are not Greek, nor do we speak it at the moment… we can barely manage broken German …and English is a trial at times too. Once again, it is the journey that counts and not all the vicissitudes and complex articulations on the way. The journey and the degree of sincerity and caring that accounts for the verbosity in the first place is what actually projects wherever it winds up in the end. We think we see outside ourselves but everything we see is seen within and that is why we should always take care to look within as our primary inquiry.

Still with us here? If not, I am sure you can find other oracles on the Cartoon Channel. These days there are a whole lot of viewing options on your television and computer device and even inside your own head. Regardless of what we think we know about how the world works and the subtleties of it’s totality and minutiae, there are all kinds of things we don’t know off the cuff. There are games inside of games going on, on the great ‘Risk’ board. For one to think that they actually ‘get it’ is to be a self deluded buffoon. Life is and has always been, more than any one mind- separated from the only mind to begin with- can categorize, strategize, understand or comprehend. We are certainly permitted to believe that we know what is happening. We are not permitted to actually know what is happening, simply because the idea that a personal mind even exists is a fallacy. First know thyself. Then everything else will fall into place accordingly and that is not just my own personal view because that is a fallacy too; the idea that my having one is possible and applies to anything real in the first place. Well sure, in the land of delusion anything is possible. That don’t make it real.

It has probably taken me a great deal of time and suffering to understand a few simple truths. I couldn’t tell you how much time or suffering. Mercifully, the memory of the totality of it is hidden from me most of the while. I’m pretty sure it was extensive though. For all I know, it took me longer than everyone else from my period and I am only the slow one that got left behind last time. That would make me the guy in “Idiocracy”. One should always keep the thought of this kind of possibility in mind. It might always turn out to be that we are The Last Retard from Atlantis, doomed to be the smartest person left on a planet where no one listens or pays any attention. It’s one of those Cassandra spinoffs. Something that got filmed as a pilot but never got screened.

Taking yourself seriously is one of the biggest mistakes anyone can make; that’s just my opinion and since there is no me, I suppose I will just have to live with the ignorance of that statement until the truth of the matter dawns on me. Regardless, there is no way to take these words back. As Omar Khayyam said;

“the moving finger, having writ, moves on-
and not all your piety or wit
can lure it back to cancel half a line,
nor all your tears, wash out a word of it.”

Along with Lao Tzu and a child’s small handful of others, this is where I take my counsel from. At 18, while working in a Gospel Mission in Washington DC, a drunk… in for his 3 days a month stay in one of our rooms, quoted a few lines of Omar’s work to me and I went directly to the library the next day and got a copy of E, Fitzgerald’s translation (the only one worth reading and the same with Witter Bynner and his Lao Tzu) and then also discovered a recording of Lord Alfred Drake reading it and then in a couple of weeks or so, I memorized the whole thing. As I remember, there was something like 114 quatrains of four lines each… well, that would be a quatrain. I don’t remember it all any more- consciously …but that is no longer important either. It is not the details of what educated you that counts. It is the depth of the impact. I memorized all kinds of things I no longer remember and they didn’t have the same impact… at all.

I could be a better person; speaking on my own behalf and I’m working on that. I am quite sure that most everyone who comes here is doing so as well. I have a lot of confidence in you. Without you I would be nowhere near as well equipped as I am. It’s kind of an ironic take on, “it takes a village” as opposed to whatever hired wit came up with that on behalf of the one who really means, “it takes a pillage”. Rape and pillage, rape and pillage, let’s go out a burn a native village, you can’t have one, you can’t have one, you can’t have one without the other…

Yeah… I suspect we could all do better but I also suspect we are doing the best we can. We all have our personal levels of what is possible for us and the degree of that may differ but relatively it matters as much as it matters, relatively.

By now, you should know they are all a pack of liars. Unlike a lot of the wish in one hand and shit in the other hopeful types, I haven’t the slightest faith in this latest collection of feckless and scheming overachievers. I do believe that the ineffable weaves every real and seeming evil toward a tapestry of greater good. There is no telling where or how it all expresses in that regard. I don’t spend a lot of time in speculation about any of it anymore. I just try to keep my head down and do my job and hope I even know what that is. “Que sera, sera.” Was it Patty Page that sang that long ago? I can’t remember a lot of things anymore and it is not because my memory is faulty. It is near eidetic where it counts but one tends to lose elements that are not important to the greater theme. Something that I do remember is that when my parents were out of the house, I used to play that song over and over as a small child… on the record player and it spoke volumes to me at the time. I also used to play “The Shifting Whispering Sands” and “May the God Lord Bless and Keep You.”

You know… I think I will close with the lyrics to the last of those. I still sing that song to myself and it still makes me weep. Have a beautiful day.

“May the good lord bless and keep you
Whether near or far away
May you find that long awaited
Golden day today

May your troubles all be small ones
And your fortunes ten times ten
May the good Lord bless and keep you
Till we meet again

May you walk with sunlight shining
And a bluebird in every tree
May there be a silver lining
Back of every cloud you see

Fill your dreams with sweet tomorrows
Never mind what might have been
May the good Lord bless and keep you
Till we meet again

(May you walk with sunlight shining)
And a bluebird in every tree
(May there be a silver lining)
Back of every cloud you see

Fill your dreams with sweet tomorrows
Never mind what might have been
May the good Lord bless and keep you
Till we meet again

May the good Lord bless and keep you
Till we meet again
Till we meet again
”May the good lord bless and keep you.”

End Transmissions…….

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