Crucify him!

"Auden once wrote, in explaining why he was a Christian rather than a believer in some other god or great spiritual leader, 'I believe because he fulfills none of my dreams, because He is in every respect the opposite of what He would be if I could have made Him in my own image.... None of the others arouse all sides of my being to cry "Crucify Him."'" (Alan Jacobs, Looking Before and After, 98)

an overly idealistic attempt at a poetic essay

imago mundi

                only a draft

Images and the image

          —for it is only an image—

                                  of man—

                                      grayed out,

                                      corpulent, but

                                      sickly, (as a

                                      corpse)

                                      corpulent with info,

                                      sickly in mind.

Problems will perpetually plague

words—written words—

and they hulk yet larger in

the epoch of today.

Films, films, films.

“The Avengers was awesome.”

“Hey, you watched Divergent?”

No, I watched The Godfather.

But let me talk about films.

They’re the apotheosis of the

Image.

Moving images,

And thrill,

And you know I’m talking about the

Action film that Marvel/Disney has perfected.

The cume of these films are

Staggering

And the extent of their influence

Is enormous,

And, I won’t be a snobbish elitist here,

I love Marvel films (not Divergent, please spare me),

But they do eventually become scratchy disks

(But that metaphor isn’t relevant anymore, is it?)

And the thrill is gone away.

But I’m off on a rabbit trail

(Notice the inordinate amount of beginning conjunctions).

The reader will be alienated—

The serious reader I mean

(But what delineates “seriousness” in a reader, huh?)—

Because the reader doesn’t get the image pre-fab.

The reader has to create,

Become a co-creator of the image,

Has to actually use the faculty of

Imagination.

Imagination is usually lost after childhood,

But the reader who has read from five,

Who has read under covers with a flashlight,

In the car, in the bathroom,

Retains some of that imagination, no matter how vestigial.

I, for one, associate imagination with books,

Old musty books—

Wardrobes to Narnia, private portals to god-littered Greece—

Books which jump from thought to thought now,

Because the pages are like the hairs of my dad’s head,

Stressed out.

The book demands use of image-ing,

And children don’t mind,

And hence the teen, the grown-up who carries in the pockets of the heart

Some residue of child-ness,

Doesn’t mind, at least not as much as the non-reader.

But the pervasive pull of the image that requires

Minimal work

Affects even the reader.

                                        I mean,

Look at the state of the novel.

The Hunger Games, film-adaptable?

Yes. Divergent, Maze Runner, and what have you,

All adaptable for the silver screen?

You betcha.

Not that the popular novel hasn’t been perennially full of schmaltz,

But that it is now losing the one commendable quality it carried:

The impetus for imagination.

But now, how does the literary novel react?

Murakami and Rushdie both

Seem to think that the response apposite is to

Hie to the Weird Cave.

Franzen et the disaffected al. will not deign to use commonplace vocab.

But the power of evocative imagination is very much within the grasps

Of these, but what?
Filmability? 
Franzen has it, a bit.
But go back half a century. The 
Southern Gothic pack. 
Adapt Walker Percy's novels, Faulkner's.
Can't, huh
?

Rabbit trail again.

                             (I’m tired, can’t think.)

not a poem, but a play

"God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it." ~ G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Good thing the play isn't left to the embarassingly incompetent actors.

i. can't. read

went to Booksale two days ago and bought
    a translation of Gilgamesh,
    a book by Alan Jacobs (Wheaton professor at time of publishing, now at
   Baylor - surprising find)
       on testimony: narrative theology but focused on the
                  individual contra
                         Hauerwas (heh);
      and a book on Spanish
            (embarassing, but I did
             just read Pablo Neruda
             and it doesn't seem a huge
             stretch: Tagalog, Bisaya, Latin, what could possibly
              go wrong? [Dunno, maybe
                  the fact that you might
                  not actually read it?!])

- and added a few poetry books to my incessantly expanding hoard of ebooks:
      Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins
GERARD. MANLEY. HOPKINS.
Who in the world is
                              this guy?
What the heck is he trying
                                        to do?
Not only unconventional English,
   but also
      baffling, almost Greeky-Latiny word order (and if you've made acquaintance with either you know
       the struggle, the labyrinthine mud-miasma glare blur slap-facey struggle
[and such constructions as this are not beyond Gerard])
        baffling poems with the exception of
        "God's Grandeur" and a couple others
         striking evocative lines
              but only two and then
                  "let me revert to
                  nebulosity again plox.
                  thx."
Twenty poems in and I'm still all
      Wuuuuuuuu
          uuuuuuuuu
            uuuuuuuuu
              uuuuuuuuu
                uuuuuuuuu
                                t

- but
             anyway -
      
      Browning, Gerard Butler Leonidas Hopkins,
      Andrew George's translation of Gilgamesh (heh)
         [and this Alan Jacobs fellow has piqued
           my interest in Auden]

and I bought Jonathan Franzen's
     The Corrections
           500 pp.
   and do I have the time?
        Yes yes nope yes

But
         I
             Can't
                        Reeeeeead

The distractions
                                    T.V.

       Keyboard (BACH BACH BACH BACH)

               the Interwebs
                                     
                .                        Mooar books

(you ever get the feeling that you want to read something anything so bad you end up reading nothing and instead find yourself retreading the saccharine staircase down into the depressing dregs of the internet
     horrid
              feeling)

I read a chapter and it's still
  wuuuuuu(u-jollywell-near-infinity up-up-up the y-axis)t

    And mp3 music (muzak?)
        on my phoan

"I hear in my miiiind
all this muuuuusic
and it breaks my heart
and it breaks my heart
And it breaks my he-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-eart..."
              ~ Regina
                     Spektor

Interestingly, I read best when listening to Bach or to Mahler or
to Jack White's weird croons
   and Meg White's brutal beats,
"but that ain't whatchu wanna hear
  but that's what I'll do."

Frustrating frustrating
Frust
                                        
                     ra

                                         ting.

streets of Davao City

Written while sitting in a rusty jeep in the thick of a traffic jam that was bad enough for me to whip out my phone and start writing.

Welcome to modern hell,
the sounds and smells of
Hadean urbanity.

Welcome to the land of
promise and the land
of asthma, of gases, germs,
of jeepneys—hour-long rides!—
of furious, crazy
taxis, and of tricycles
which whir and wheeze their way
through tightest alleys
and up sweaty, arduous slopes,
of bad traffic jams
enough to make a
demon out of saintliest
bishops and ministers
and worse devils
of those who already are.

This is the realm in which
temples are huge, built
to displace plywood shanties,
temples for ancient gods
dressed in tuxedos,
sporting Ray-Ban sunglasses,
shrines for insatiable
deities of the
world of infinite matter.
They even hold masses
for masses perplexed
by their two-faced religion,
religion of a dead world
and religion of
another no less lifeless.

Burnt-out hearts seeking to
burn themselves some more—
the burning out of the soul—
walking on burnt paved
ground or driving cars
to earn to die for paychecks.

Edifices of wood
and hoary towers
of bright glistening concrete
lie uncomfortable
together so that
sidewalks span eight decades.

It is telling that the 
cracked pavement and the
rotting, rotted acacia-
wood can't simply be glossed
over. They are the 
inheritance of 
contemporaneity,
of the age of today, 
which never slumbers
and thereby murders itself,
and demands a rest which
                                isn't.

This, my world, is a fact,
my milieu, the air I
 breathe, the air that crushes me,
and which I cannot crush
but have to succumb
to and breathe and breathe and breathe
because there is still life
in the oxygen
of the city  and what can
you do? You are flesh, frail,
ashy, ashen flesh.
You have a body which grows
in pain. The world's soul
groans with sorrow
for the hell it has become.
But
that's why we pray "Thy kingdom come, Thy will
be done on Earth as it is in heaven",
                                                   isn't it?

thoughts on college no. 3

careening careening careening
carelessly
tasting creamy sweets
and unaccustomed to acrid bitterness

no rejection yet
all "you are accepted
you are wanted
you are needed
by the world"
but that's preposterous
in this world of
overachievers
or the ubiquitous
"leaders"
(like "harvard is for leaders" as
cambridge would quip)
what room is there for me or
for failure
what room is there for creeps
who have a home and have
no home
(o matres almae
what possibly can
this weird kid give you)

I wait for that
rejection
with dread and strange expectation

a slap to the face
is solely the method
by which to speak
to such a prick

what did Lewis say?
that pain is God's choice
megaphone?
I know the sound
the blast the boom
of that megaphone
it isn't safe but it is
good

thoughts on college no. 2

there's a guy who stands
solitary on a beach and
the dreadful thing is
it's not so much that he
approaches the water
as the water inches
closer to his toes
his feet are blocks of
dried and dull cement
the sand long since like an
antswarm has been
devouring his feet
the sand is a fact
he is a grain of sand
abraham's sand
but even facts can be effaced
and the comfortable order upheaved
by the geist of change
the facts of sand in the horizon of his vision
are gone and eaten up
with greater velocity than
the sand had earlier concerning his feet
and the fluctus aequoris
begin to reveal their threat
the old japanese painting
of the monster tidalwave
and inside the guy
the germs of fear
and of despair
and of seasickness crack
open and
open and
open and
out shrieks suffusing rapidly
the nauseating burden of
responsibility

but there is such a rider who
the foamy horses of the sea
who on the backs leviathan
in easy calm yet glorious rides
and of the man's dead feet shall be
reviver not of feet alone
but of each sinew and the wave
of change himself does spur not for
a drowning void of meaning but a
death and undeath into life