Wallace Steven apprehends the imperative:
"The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel
that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps, After
death, the non-physical people, in paradise, Itself non-physical, may,
by chance, observe The green corn gleaming and experience The minor of
what we feel."
(Excerpt from Of Esthetique du Mal)
This parcel of sensate eternity where I find myself at this moment has been given the name, Thursday evening, and I'm sitting at my desk thrumming my fingers to the melody of cultural oblivion.
By the time the play list arrives at Monk's "Straight No Chaser," thoughts of the inevitability of my country's spiral into inexorable tragedy begin to mix, merge, and dance with Monk's incantatory melody line.
O.K. God Damn it, I rage at the wind-pummeled windowpane and my native land beyond the barren treetop:
Let's take it straight with no chaser. Let's throw back shot after shot of the rotgut truth.
Let's state the unadorned facts of our condition -- stark as the branches of a white oak tree in late fall.
So, forgive me, because this calls for an abrupt change of tempo.
It's long past time we got drunk -- drunk on reality.
Bartender, set up a round.
Let's throw back a shot: Our empire--any empire--is besotted on blood.
Throw back another: "Post Industrial empires get mean drunk on the power to level mechanized death"
One more round, for the road"to extinction: We're stupid drunk on mindless consumerism that is numbing out authentic experience and destroying the earth to boot.
We're stinking drunk on militarism, mass media escapism and consumerism -- I recommend we should get drunk on Coltrane.
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