Poem for Tybee and Buckeye by Adam Brunz

“ … only the very poor, or eccentric, can surround themselves with shapes of elegance (soon to be demolished) in which they are forced by poverty to move with leisurely grace. We remain alert so as not to get run down, but it turns out you only have to hop a few feet, to one side, and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all.”

                                                                     Lew Welch, via Gary Snyder’s “Night Highway Ninety-nine”

When I spend a long time alone

now and then a burst of gibberish

escapes from my mouth right out loud.

Just a small mound of babble, it washes away.

Like Lew said, “a plainness that obviates all poetry,”

all speech,

it comes out

like a sigh.

The tupelo swamp is brimming with surface,

bald cypress and the barest hint of a path.

There’s a couple in a boat casting their lines:

“Up there where you come from, you prolly call ’em croppie,

but we jus’ call ’em crappy.

It is beautiful out here, ain’t it?

We like it anyway.”

He turns with the drift of the boat

and recasts.

It’s a gray day at the Fort Tybee Museum:

musty halls and epic paintings of the colonists.

Great sloping walls of stone define the sky.

An abandoned beach café gives it up

               to sand and wind and broken glass.

The old fort houses the Lions Club now.

A garden of twisted rebar thrives in its shadow —

               the stalks shoot up between the tumbling ramparts.

The Lions just throw their old furniture

down from the tower.

The stragglers survey the remains —

we recognize the futility of capture.

Meanwhile the Nostalgia Dicks are growing weepy in their nests —

American boyhoods cast in golden memory light.

The general stupor is concave, a sinkhole.

Eccentricity is tolerated,

even allegedly enjoyed (as the conceit of the road less traveled),

that is, until we pursue it,

until we show we’re more serious than disarming,

and a little less serious than the insane.

One of the consequences of an unmapped future

is that so many claim you as their protégé.

Small-town mind is not exclusive to small towns.

The Buddha known as the Beginner, the Creator of Roads,

must necessarily be unhappy, that goes without saying.

All creators shall be properly stroked and coddled —

like the flight attendant says in her pep talk:

“Correct change, as always, will be appreciated.”

At Buckeye Lake

there used to be an amusement park,

now whitewashed remains, a low-rise water tower.

The lakeside dwellers all connect by one sidewalk.

At the end of the walk there’s a bar on a point.

Canal after canal sneaks off around the bend.

A metal retaining wall serves as the actual lake side,

so the folks construct all manner of contraptions

for midair boat suspension overnight or during weather —

great overarching frames of welded pipe,

winches and chains.

When the big storm comes and knocks it all over,

they just put it up again a different way,

what else are you gonna do?

The boys are making bait for catfish.

They’re making strange weapons of the future in the clubhouse

with plastic and some duct tape.

We build a feast on the back patio.

The neighbor rattles off the year and make

of every boat in the boat parade.

In time all one’s families converge,

and what happens is the only rule.

At Buckeye we had burgers at the Blue Goose diner:

a tall blue neon bird shimmers across the evening mist.

The pelicans off Tybee don’t cruise in for their quarry

with any old typical grace,

they kamikaze down and create quite a stir

while over at the Surf Shack

the day’s first kamikazes are just now being stirred.

The local patrons rub their eyes,

place their bets,

and prepare for another off-season dive.

This is resort’s meaning:

no static to shuffle through.

A man walks out of a joint at noon with his cup in his hand,

gestures at a black dog, and breathes.

All manner of ingenuity

               leads us to our eccentric solitude.

What’s respected is the distance

required to live,

when to bridge it, or not:

the surfeiting relief o a sand dollar

or we talk philosophy in a dusky Ohio boat by Cranberry Bog.

Watching for herons,

a traveler’s headache wanes.

There is a definite proclivity

for warm dank air,

a bath for the nervous system.

There are the ruins.

There is a long and misty beach.

No one’s watching,

               we’re all gone fishing.

Thoughts on Mortality:

D.Luttenberger,2010

Void & Emptiness

Pause to ponder the above

Perhaps, these should be capitalized

VOID & EMPTINESS

!

Of course

There is also good reason to think they
should not be capitalized

void & emptiness

.

I suspect

In the Grand Scheme

Font can have no significant impact

on mortality

Ummmm!

Something else to think about

?

Alcatraz, In Kino Bay

For Tony Beasley

Skulls rattle the sand in an off-shore wind
Full of saguaro, cholla and offal
Carrion on the claws of vultures
Kingbirds of the naked sun

The spine of a frigate bird lies upon the shore
Under the shadow of Tiburon, the shark
I pick it up and it sings in my hand
Conjuring ghosts of memory

A depot, where a Yaqui waits with her son
Beneath black shawls in the hot sun
Silence, except for the buzz of flies
And the flap of vultures overhead

In the air dance shadows, phantoms!
A husband, two years an illegal alien
An ailing boy and no money for the medico
And Mama Grande at home, on her death bed
A crucifix across her breast like desert sand

Head bent, the Yaqui waits with her son
Beneath black shawls in the hot sun

She dreams of her lover in Hermosillo
Of toys for the ninos
And dresses in shop windows
She dreams of food
And the taste of beer on the dry tongue
She dreams, but wakes to the empty belly
And the miles to go

So we give them a ride to Puerto Penasco
A drink of flat water from a hot canteen
And speak of life in broken syllables
As if we understood anything
Two gringos in an Oldsmobile

In the barrio she sings sad songs
Playing a broken, three string guitar
Her boy shoots marbles on the concrete floor
While I stare at a picture of a tiny blue child
Not two hours dead
“Mi favorito!" she says
One of eleven now gone

“Mexico!” I sigh
Placing the bones back on the shore
Gazing up into the empty sky

By: D.B. Luttenberger, 4/3/1980

POEM: Journey

Journey

You hold up your hand
To shade your eyes from the harsh light
The landscape outside is rugged
Devoid of meaning

The planets spin endlessly
Stars explode
And gyrate outward from the center
An anomaly
The beginning of time

There is no reason
No sign we are on the right path
The heat is sometimes unbearable
At other times
The cold penetrates your bones

It is a long journey
Begun at birth
Carried forward out of darkness
Over jagged surfaces

Our thoughts congeal
A world projects around us
A web of meaning
Broken promises, sickness, death
We discover mortality
We balance over the abyss

I go, not willingly, but
Because I must, no choice

I chose a path
But not the journey
An infinite array of paths
Like spider webs surround
And I must find the middle way
Between the darkness
And the light

Moments of intense joy
The discovery of hidden meaning
In the heart of stone

Moments of pleasure
In the arms of love
We touch another’s soul

Moments of illumination
Ideas form
Between minds
Two souls as one

For a moment

And then it’s gone

dbl2007

QUOTATION - George Berkeley (1685 - 1753)

"Truth and beauty are in this alike, that the strictest survey sets them both off to advantage; while the false lustre of error and disguise cannot endure being reviewed, or too nearly inspected." Spoken by Philonous in The Second Dialogue, published in 1713.

ESSAY: Make Peace Not War - An Alternate Response to Terrorism

(A radical interpretation of the events of 9/11 and the United States reaction to it as viewed through the writings of the Buddhist teacher and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh. Nhat Hanh was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 for his contribution to the Vietnam War peace effort.)

“If men are not afraid to die,
It is of no avail to threaten them with death.” Tao Te Ching

A Cataclysmic Event:

We live in a violent time; violent games, violent entertainment, violent streets, violent world. If the 17th century was the Renaissance, the 18th the Age of Reason, the 19th the Industrial Age, then the 20th century is surely the Age of Violence. Instead of reaping the bounty of technology, we are aiming weapons at each other. On September 11, 2001, terrorists flew 3 airplanes into major symbols of America’s capitalist and military strength. This resulted in the death of thousands of American citizens. Whether they were “innocent” or merely “non-combatants” is one of the central issues of this essay. As a result of this attack, their lives, their families’ lives and the lives of every American citizen was changed forever. Although we have always been an aggressive and violent nation, that violence has always been on foreign shores. Not since Pearl Harbor has it occurred within our nation’s borders. The reaction to Pearl Harbor was a nuclear holocaust that took 200,000 lives in one afternoon. The response to 9/11 has far surpassed this in casualties. Unlike Hiroshima, it is not directed at a single country, it is directed at a vague target, called terrorism, which exists in every country throughout the globe, hidden amongst the people of the earth.

The 9/11 attack was brutal. What we find most alarming is that it is seemingly, to us, without motive. It was a deliberate, premeditated plan, executed to extract the maximum amount of carnage on men, women and children who had never consciously intended to harm those who had attacked them. The attackers did not consider them people, only targets; the enemy. We were suddenly at war with an enemy totally unknown to us. We have a vague picture that they are of another world, another religion, and another region. How would we define them; Middle Eastern, Muslim, radical extremists? But so far away, so remote from our daily lives, we cannot understand how they can hate us enough to kill us indiscriminately. Is it simply because we are Americans, Christians, capitalists? Or is it because we have done something to them that we are not even aware of?

And what was our response? It has “filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness and a quiet unyielding anger…the search is underway for those that are behind these evil acts. I’ve directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities, to find those responsible and bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them…we stand together to win the war against terrorism…God Bless America” (George Bush, September 11, 2001). So we are at war in the name of God! We have already attacked two countries, unseated the ruling regimes, and are preparing to attack another. And yet, the terrorists who flew the engines of destruction on 9/11 were already dead before the “War on Terror” began.

“The Roots of Peace” An Alternative:

“Practicing non-violence is first of all to become non-violence…we have to transcend the tendency to take sides” Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step (See note 1.)

Is the only answer to violence – violence? In the face of tragedy, isn’t anger, fear, outrage a natural response? How can we discuss peace when we are under attack? What would Nhat Hanh do? He believes in justice. “I am not saying that someone who viciously attacks us should not be disciplined, but what is most important is that we first take care of the seeds of negativity in ourselves. Then if someone needs to be helped or disciplined, we will do so out of compassion, not anger and retribution” (p 64). Also, he is no stranger to anger. “Anger is an unpleasant feeling, it is like a blazing flame that burns up our self control and causes us to say and do things that we regret later. When someone is angry we can see clearly that he or she is abiding in hell. Anger and hatred are the materials from which hell is made” (p 57). Clearly, Hanh has known hatred and anger; anyone who knows anger this deeply has experienced and conquered it. What is most important is not to act until we have gotten our anger under control. If we think on this deeply enough, we will come to realize that those who caused the acts of 9/11 are angry too. Our anger will not lessen their anger it will only add fuel to the fire.

We seek an alternate path because war does not work. It does not eliminate those responsible; it does not address the source of the problem. War may attempt to seek justice, but does not address injustice. War is, by its very definition, born from the dualistic view of life. It is the ultimate “us – them” argument. Hahn would say violence will only create more violence. Violence born from suffering can only cause more suffering. Before we can deal with violence in the outer world we must first deal with it in ourselves.

9/11: A Bell of Mindfulness:

Can such a terrible event, an event that took the lives of thousands, be a bell of mindfulness to the path of peace? The Buddhists say, “Life is suffering.” Can suffering be the event that opens us to the truth behind it? Following the roots of our feelings down into ourselves, we begin to discover, who we are. “When we want to understand something, we cannot stand outside and observe it…to comprehend something is to pick it up and be one with it, there is no other way to understand something. In Buddhism, we call this kind of understanding “non-duality.” Not two” (p 100) I am certain that Hanh would say that the only way out of the violent conflict in which we find ourselves, is compassion. Whenever we feel our anger welling up inside of us, we must return to the event of 9/11 and let this act lead us through our feelings mindfully, to discover the compassion in ourselves that we will need to resolve this conflict.

What will we find if we look deeply inside ourselves? Will we find that those that attacked us are suffering too? It is not because of their anger that they attack us; it is because of their suffering. If we counterattack in anger we will feed their anger, but if we address their suffering through compassion, we might find a way to put out the blaze of their anger. We transform our anger into something useful and in doing so, we change the world. And although we change only the world inside of us, this is the first step in transforming the world around us. “To transform our situation is also to transform our minds, to transform our minds is also to transform our situation, because the situation is mind and the mind is situation…The nature of the bombs, the nature of injustice and the nature of our own beings are the same” (p 112). Therefore, if we can see through our fear and anger, and truly feel compassion for the suffering of our enemy, we transform not only our own world, but the world of our enemy as well.

“Engaged Buddhism” A Platform for Action:

Once one understands that the violence on both sides is due to the suffering of our enemy and ourselves, one comes to realize that the suffering of both is related. Buddhism teaches us that all life is an interconnected membrane, much like a spider web, and like a fly trapped in the web, the spider can feel his struggle through the strands of the web. This leads us to the concept of inter-being. “We cannot just be by ourselves. We have to inter-be with every other thing” (p 96). To look deeply into our relationship with the terrorist is for us to realize that we are somewhat responsible for his actions against us. As we stated earlier, we are “non-combatants” but we are not “innocent.” The terrorists are members of a third world society that lives in the shadow of our affluence. All the wonders of our modern world run on engines driven by oil, the very oil that lies beneath their lands, their homes, their cities. We rape their natural resources for our own pleasure and give them nothing in return. It is true that vast sums of money go into the hands of the dictators that rule these lands, but little of this money finds its way into the pockets or kitchens of the people. “Let us look at wealth and poverty. The affluent society and the deprived society inter-are. The wealth of one society is made of the poverty of the other…we cannot just be, we can only inter-be. We are responsible for everything that happens around us” (p 98).

America has built a marvelous land, we have enjoyed prosperity at home and peace within our borders, but we have paid a terrible price in the poverty of others. The central problem is there is not enough to go around, so some must have more, while others have less. This is the injustice felt by the entire third world, and as the flames of injustice boil to the surface through the acts of the terrorist, the only way to solve terrorism is to extinguish the source of the fire. So what does the Buddhist do in the face of violence and injustice? “Should we continue to practice in our monasteries, or should we leave the meditation halls in order to help the people who are suffering under the bombs? After careful reflection we decided to do both –to go out and help people and to do so in mindfulness. We called it engaged Buddhism” (p 91). In the West, we do not need to be Buddhist to think expansively, we can be engaged Humanists. What would Hanh do? Hanh would act to relieve the suffering of everyone, he would demonstrate for peace, he would lead others to the meditation halls to quench their anger, and he would write his congressman. Hanh would “wage peace” with all the determination that America now wages war. “If the earth were your body, you would be able to feel the many areas where it is suffering. War, political and economic oppression, famine, and pollution wreak havoc in so many places. Every day children are becoming blind from malnutrition, their hands searching hopelessly through mounds of trash for a few ounces of food. Adults are dying slowly in prisons for trying to oppose violence…real strength is not in power, money or weapons, but in deep, inner peace…with clarity, determination and patience – the fruits of meditation – we can sustain a life of action and be real instruments of peace” (p 99).

The National Response – A Nation of Engaged Humanists:

“The Tao of Heaven is to take from those who have too much
and give to those who do have not enough.
Man’s way is different.
He takes from those who do not have enough to give to those
who already have too much.
What man has more than enough and gives it to the world?
Only the man of Tao.” Tao Te Ching

The present national response to terrorism shatters the world into two opposing camps, us and them, the enemy. In preparation to kill our enemy, we must demonize him. He becomes “the evil-doer” and we become the champions of justice, all under the watchful eye of our Christian God. We have turned the clock back a thousand years to the Crusades, a Christian military expedition to recover the Holy Lands from the Muslims. How can this ever bring peace to the world? If we succeed in capturing the lands and ousting their governments, will the people accept us as friends and equals, or will they view us as just the new dictator in town. “In order to fight each other, the chicks born from the same mother hen, put colors on their faces. This is a well known Vietnamese saying; putting colors on our own face is to make ourselves a stranger to our own brothers and sisters. We can only shoot others when they are strangers. Real efforts for reconciliation arise when we see with the eyes of compassion, and that ability comes when we see clearly the nature of inter-being and inter-penetration of all beings” (p 118). We must put out the fires of war that will only tear us apart. We must take off our colors and learn to embrace the enemy as brothers and sisters.

Consider the trillions of dollars that America will pour into the war effort. We have spent billions in Afghanistan, and hundreds of billions in Iraq. Think of the good we could do with that money if it were invested in the poor of the earth. If the only way to eliminate terrorism is to put an end to the suffering caused by hunger, hopelessness and despair, then as a nation of engaged humanists we would share our wealth and prosperity with people, not just the rulers. We would go to Congress and levy a tax on every barrel of oil extracted from the third world and use that money to build schools, hospitals and farms, to feed and heal all the people of the world. In the schools we would train them to teach themselves and heal themselves and feed themselves. We would not make them dependent on us, but we would share our prosperity. Eventually, the poor of the earth will come to see the goodness in our hearts, once they recognize the goodness and love that is flowing from us; they will take off their colors too. We will have removed the source of injustice that fuels the terrorists’ actions. If the terrorists persist in this climate, their own people will see the injustice in their actions and will no longer hide them in their homes or in their hearts. Without the people’s support, terrorism can not exist.

“I think we need a policy for dealing with our suffering. We do not want to condone it, but we need to find a way to make use of our suffering, for our good and for the good of others…we need to use the suffering of the 20th century as compost for the 21st century…
If we are willing to work together and learn together, we can all benefit from the mistakes of our time, and, seeing with the eyes of compassion and understanding, we can offer the next century a beautiful garden and a clear path” (p 134).

“Peace is available in every moment, in every breath, in every step” (p 134).

Note 1: Unless noted otherwise, all page references are to “Peace is Every Step,” Thich Nhat Hanh, Bantam, 1992.

Poem - On the Probability...

“It is evident that the ideas of permanent truth-value and fluctuating truth-value apply in reality to symbolic forms and not to propositions or propositional functions.” Alfred N. Whitehead & Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, 1912.

We know, a priori, gross matters
In a world Principia Mathematica.
(i.e., e.g., limit f(x) = L)
We know such things as schizophrenia
And other pathologicals,
Of ribosome and chromosome
The physiology of the neural cell.

And for those evenings
When we’re drinking late
Metaphysical esoterica of time and space.

We know there’s work at nine
Dinner at eight.
These things we know
As Newton knew, F/M = A.

Or do we play the ingénue?
For Newton dreamed so long ago.

With hypertrophied cerebellum
We can’t define an electron’s spin
Or point to some particular place it’s in
Or, knowing place, predict its subsequent behavior
Whether wave or matter, matter-wave.
Symbol bound we fumble with infinity

The BIG BANG!

(A scattering of energy spun outwards
From some dense and smoldering core
Radiating-coalescing-transubstantiating.
Tyche leering, leaning on the wheel
Careening toward unknown and inconceivable shores.)

Do we hear cacophony
In this music of the spheres?

So certainly did we proceed
From premises to hypotheses
Hypotheses to theories
That we were taken unawares
By Einstein’s relativity
And Heisenberg’s uncertainty.

Uncertainty?
Who could have made a universe imperfectly?

We are such things as quantum dust
And strings that vibrate in the dusk
As night descends
We are alone, together, at the end.

Senescence, not graduation
Was the degree of our initiation
Into a universe of vague uncertainty
Where death lay waiting.

A reality we could not transcend
An immortality we did not intend
To end so damned abruptly.

Without recourse we cast our fate.
As we forsake the security of faith
For truth which does depend
Upon the vagaries of probability.

Our insatiate tenacity
For knowledge and veracity
Seem to devolve
Into that fearful dark abyss
Where theories translate to hieroglyphs
And galaxies dissolve.

Of late, gross matters seem insignificata
In a world post Principia Mathematicata.