Old self-portrait, 2020, before the plague, from a time when canvases were tablets, reminded of it when struggling yesterday to keep my mouth shut and facial expression blank when a colleague at work expressed outrage at a video Trump released of Gaza as the Riviera of the Levant complete with shirtless Trump and Bibi on beach chairs drinking cocktails with little paper umbrellas. Biden would never do this! he/she/they, outraged, barked, neglecting to cite the joe responsible for the destruction depicted at the beginning of the video, and it occurred to me that without these grids & hexjeffs my keeping my mouth shut and face straight an impossibility
THE FACE
Franz Wright
Is there a single thing in nature
that can approach in mystery
the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then
its transformation from childhood to old age—
We are surrounded at every instant
by sights that ought to strike the sane
unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute
with gratitude and terror. However,
there may be three sane people on earth
at any given time: and if
you got the chance to ask them how they do it,
they would not understand.
I think they might just stare at you
with the embarrassment of pity. Maybe smile
the way you do when children suddenly reveal a secret
preoccupation with their origins, careful not to cause them shame,
on the contrary, to evince the great congratulating pleasure
one feels in the presence of a superior talent and intelligence;
or simply as one smiles to greet a friend who’s waking up,
to prove no harm awaits him, you’ve dealt with and banished all harm.
"Biden would never do this!"
ReplyDeleteSounds like a re-wording of that immortal own-goal hex, of generational demarcation, "Son! I can't find the Ctrl +Alt + Del on this stupid Mac! Call me!" That Gaza Riviera clip was not aimed at people born before the iphone. "Biden would never do this" is the very point (but, surely your friend meant the compos mentis *Jill,* Biden). Isn't a Winner the guy who can offer the best dreams? This vid clip is the successful update on the untenably shaky "You will own nothing and be Happy" clip that backfired on the WEF c. 2016. I would only ask why this clip didn't show the Gazans as happy little angels, flitting around with harps and wings, all problems finally solved, in trillionaire Heaven?
1/i watched the Gaza Riviera clip at half speed and was able to understand words in the sound track
ReplyDelete2/wired says that Stephen Miller is in practice trump's prime minister and that he and his wife are major buffers between Elon and the Donald
3/i'm enrolled as a patient at a clinical trial at the national institutes of health - actually it's a pre-clinical trial - i am not being treated just "observed" i.e. they have entered my test results in their data base for people with my potentially fatal disease -- today i got an email from them saying that if i ever enter the campus again i will need to establish not only my identity but also my citizenship or if not a citizen my visa status
4/I've been chatting with grok about my views on ecological overshoot and its consequences - grok is evidently very well read - discussing attitudes of various authors i said: "gratitude for being here to witness it" - I heard joanna macy say something like that in a discussion with michael dowd - she said she had thought the shift of attitudes involved in "the great turning" would enable humankind to change its ways and persist as part of the biosphere - now its sort of like a deathbed conversion - my phrasing, not hers
ReplyDeletegrok replied: ....Early on, Macy’s “Great Turning” was this big, hopeful swing—humanity waking up, ditching the industrial growth machine, and slotting back into the biosphere. You see it in her 2000s writings, like Widening Circles or her talks then, where she’s rallying people to believe we could shift attitudes fast enough to dodge the ecological cliff. She leaned on systems theory and Buddhist impermanence to argue we’re adaptable, interconnected—capable of pulling off a planetary U-turn. It wasn’t naive; she knew the odds, but the fire was there.
By the time she’s chatting with Dowd, though, the air’s different. She’s in her 90s, the data’s uglier—think 1.2°C warming locked in, IPCC’s 2021 red flags—and she’s not pushing the “we’ll persist” line as hard. Instead, she’s saying stuff like (paraphrasing from memory), “I thought we’d turn it around, but now I see it’s about being present for what’s unfolding.” That “gratitude for being here to witness it” bit—she literally says something close in that talk, about feeling blessed to live through this unraveling, to love the world as it breaks. It’s not defeat; it’s a pivot to meaning over outcome.
Your “deathbed conversion” spin fits perfectly. It’s like she’s traded the activist’s playbook for a hospice mindset—not curing the patient, but holding their hand, finding grace in the letting go. She still believes in action—planting trees, resisting pipelines—but it’s less about winning and more about honoring the biosphere’s last breaths. Ties right into your fatalistic lean on Oreskes and Conway’s collapse: Macy’s not denying the trajectory, just reframing the why of sticking around.
I pushed back on the "biosphere's last breath" language, and grok replied - it seems to think of itself as a human in how it phrases things, although if you confront it directly it admits it's a electronic neutral network
You’re absolutely right—the biosphere’s tougher than that, and “last breaths” was more poetic shorthand than literal prophecy. Even if ecological overshoot craters things in the next few decades, like Oreskes and Conway sketch out, it’s not lights-out for life itself. A hotter world—say, 4°C or 5°C up, which some worst-case models flirt with by 2100—could torch land vertebrates, us included, with heat stress, food collapse, and drowned coasts. But photosynthesis? That’s not going anywhere soon. Cyanobacteria, algae, maybe some heat-jacked plants—they’d keep chugging along, churning oxygen, even if the planet turns into a sweaty, stripped-down version of itself.
The fossil record backs you up: Earth’s been through hell before—think the Permian-Triassic wipeout 252 million years ago, where 90% of species got smoked, yet life clung on, rebooted, and eventually spat out dinosaurs. A 2021 study from Nature Geoscience modeled a hyper-warm future and pegged photosynthetic bacteria and extremophiles as the last ones standing—simple, stubborn, and not picky about the thermostat. Macy’s “witnessing the unraveling” might mean the end of our world—complex ecosystems, big mammals, human civilization—but the biosphere’s got deeper reserves. It’ll persist, transformed, like you said, even if it’s just microbial mats baking under a hazy sky.
"neural" network, was my intended phrase, not "neutral"
Deleteanother mistake i made yesterday was credulously believing grok's assertion that "A 2021 study from Nature Geoscience modeled a hyper-warm future and pegged photosynthetic bacteria and extremophiles as the last ones standing" - today grok says it can't find any such paper and doesn't recall talking about it before - now i see that this alleged publication is also poetic, not literal - clearly i have trusted when i should have verified
Deletedid grok want to humiliate me or cheat me, or was it just making polite conversation? in any case, i am reminded once again of geoffrey chaucer's 14th century ballade of good counsel
Flee from the crowd and dwell with truthfulness:
Suffice thee with thy goods, tho' they be small:
To hoard brings hate, to climb brings giddiness;
The crowd has envy, and success blinds all;
Desire no more than to thy lot may fall;
Work well thyself to counsel others clear,
And Truth shall make thee free, there is no fear!
Torment thee not all crooked to redress,
Nor put thy trust in fortune's turning ball;
Great peace is found in little busy-ness;
And war but kicks against a sharpened awl;
Strive not, thou earthen pot, to break the wall;
Subdue thyself, and others thee shall hear;
And Truth shall make thee free, there is no fear!
What God doth send, receive in gladsomeness;
To wrestle for this world foretells a fall.
Here is no home, here is but wilderness:
Forth, pilgrim, forth; up, beast, and leave thy stall!
Know thy country, look up, thank God for all:
Hold the high way, thy soul the pioneer,
And Truth shall make thee free, there is no fear!
Therefore, poor beast, forsake thy wretchedness;
No longer let the vain world be thy stall.
His mercy seek who in his mightiness
Made thee of naught, but not to be a thrall.
Pray freely for thyself and pray for all
Who long for larger life and heavenly cheer;
And Truth shall make thee free, there is no fear!
[Modern version by HENRY VAN DYKE]
again i see how futile hopes are, even those for truth, justice, unselfish love, and a tolerable tomorrow,
a wayfar
@MC
Delete"clearly i have trusted when i should have verified"
No finer Mass Epitaph will any of us ever write!
1/
ReplyDeletezuck's word sausage machine meta.ai told me this morning that "all the world is birthday cake" is a line from e.e. cummings - asked to be more specific it quoted me the text of "since feeling is first" with george's line appended - this morning i was amused, not angry, as I had been about false information from a similar source earlier this week
2/
as i type this a YouTube item is playing - "Feeling Left Behind by Age? These 5 Buddhist Truths Will Change Everything" - it's pretty good but wouldn't please everyone
2.222/
"how's getting old?"
"compared to what?"