Year-End Inventory

This has been an excellent year. My kids and my wife are in good health. My philosophy class went well, I have two new books coming out.

The one great problem that remains is the question of a universal standard for both art and life. In some ways the two are antithetical. The ten commandments frame an excellent standard for life, and the abrogation of that standard and the consequences thereof reveal an excellent standard for art.

Therefore, life makes sense and is quite comfortable.

We have two new families in our church. We have found an adequate babysitter, and it looks like one of the new families may contain an alternate babysitter.

The perplexing enigma of the relationship of aesthetics to ethics and how politics may or may not figure is just teasing enough to interest but not overwhelm us. I could take another thirty or forty years along these lines before I meet my Maker. Praise be to God.

My daughter, Lola Olson, just whispered into my ear a secret.

"Black is a girl's color."

I'm not supposed to tell anybody. So then I told Lola, "Lola, I would like to announce this fiat of yours to the whole world."

She then watched me type it in. She laughed as she watched me type in the words.

Later, she asked me, "When you take a black crayon and make a house on paper, what is it that happens? Why do the black marks become houses and trees and clouds?"

"Also," she added, "How am I able to move my hand when I draw? What makes my hand go?"

Geez, the same things that stump theoreticians of consciousness like Daniel Dennett and his friends stump five-year-olds.

She said she would have a lot more questions for me in the morning. I don't know anything! Will it scare her to realize this? Tomorrow we have a plan to go and look at the college's steam plant. I have no idea what heat is, or how it is spread through the campus or what it is that the men over there do, but one of them goes to a church near by and I meet him on the road and he agreed to let us come over and ponder these things.

Does anybody know the answer to how black crayon goes on to paper? I know it does, but why does it go on so smoothly? What is it exactly that transfers? What on earth IS a crayon? I hope somebody answers by the time I get up in the morning.

The Poetry Reading: Some Remarks

The poetry reading is the greatest danger to public morality since the invention of alcohol.

One goes and hears others' vices presented as virtues: who so and so slept with or is in love with, various aesthetic experiences regarding museum visits, even paeans to excellent food.

In Wesleyan circles theatre was banned until recently. All art, banned. At prayer meetings Wesleyans exchanged discussions of their spiritual lives. This is a proper topic for a poetry reading.

Other topics I consider proper: public works, as in clover-leaf highway overpasses, lengthy descriptions of the sewerage system complete with plumbing details and quantities of sewerage processed per hour, or perhaps a comparative study of food distribution in North Dakota and North Korea. Leaders could be discussed from the viewpoint of their interest in sidewalks, or in public health hospitals, as long as charts and graphs are brought forward.

The comparative utility of different brands of nails? Yes, that's fine.

There are no other acceptable topics.

DRIVING

Driving up Route 10 from Deposit
We get gas in sub-zero weather
An enormous factory billowed steam
"They're definitely making something," Riikka joked
Then the hard drive barely following the path
Cars flipped every ten miles for fifty miles
Their legs whirring like bugs' legs
At Hamden finally
After 40 miles of desolate driving
3 inches of snow and ice and no yellow line
A major 3-car crash with ambulances & fire engines
Finally pulling into our driveway
The wheel wells almost completely closed with ice
Tires almost unable to move
This morning I washed it all out with Tristan at the car wash
Then we went up to the office in Evenden Tower
He watched Blues Clues Go to School
While I worked on my Barbara Wilson article
Friends again -- he's been difficult lately
I pay more attention to him
He's nicer in return
I think today of the vast reservoirs
Creeks so cold a steam arose from them
The terror of the long rising highway 17
Back from Binghamton
We had been to Target for Christmas gifts
Thomas the Tank Engine books
Lola B. so sweetly explaining things
Old wooden trains
Then the B&N bookstore
Julian pooped all over himself as if he'd exploded
No extra pants
We had to drive home hard & fast for 50 miles
Holding our noses all the way

December 20, 2004

DIFFERENCES

The sense of time goes unquestioned
Entelechial questions go unanswered
The sense of a nation's promise lost
The idea of a forward march is imperialism now
Aristotle's notion of a better world to come
Has been replaced by Schopenhauer's nauseating ID
Nietzsche picks it up
Hitler picks up on it, too
Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will

Thanksgiving:
The Indians lay out a feast
The whites slaughter them

The ideas of our world-views aren't clear
I'm fighting to clarify them
Yes to two kingdoms
Yes to meaning
Yes to the entelechial
Jesus as the primary figure of the avant-garde
He could walk on water
He could insist on justice for the poor.

WINTER IN DELHI

I don't like it here so much in winter. Unless you like to clomp around in snowshoes or glide down a mountain on skis until you bang your head on an old oak, it's better to stay inside. In this fly-infested building I am often found staring out of the seventh floor east window on to the town. The town is three streets wide, and about ten streets long. There are two traffic lights. Oddly, even in a small town like this one is often subject to road rage. It's almost inexplicable but a lot of traffic comes through this town, and so you are always getting stuck behind a huge truck carrying heaven knows what, as it makes its way through the narrow streets of the town.

It wasn't always like this. There used to be trains that carried the heavy business. Down below this seven-story building (the tallest in the county) is an area where strange old buildings are half-falling down. What are they doing there? It used to be the old train depot. Now gone for 50 years the train line is still what orients this village. The pile of crumbling weather-beaten yellowing buildings now almost collapsed house a few feed stores, a newish soda machine, a car-wash, a lumber company (the Delaware river starts just fifty miles north of here and one branch of it comes through Delhi), and some other things I haven't been able to identify.

Now it's the highway that goes along the path of the railway. It goes fifty miles south to a town called Deposit. Deposit is what the old lumber companies did. They deposited their logs there.

Today that area to the south is mostly desolate. Many towns that once lined the Delaware River are now in fact underneath the water of the enormous reservoirs thirty miles or so in length that now belong to the NYC water department. Lonely highways stretch alongside of them. Every ten miles or so one sees a house. Vast lakes of desolation. One thinks of the film Chinatown and the desperation of LA for water. NYC also has its strange water department with its own police and its own ambition. People grumble about it but nobody knows for sure what they're up to on a daily basis.

The train that used to come up to Delhi hasn't done so for 50 years. Some say that they can still hear a ghost train whistling through but they'd be pulling your leg. I like to drive those lonely stretches while listening to Bach on my car stereo. That's one good thing about winter in Delhi.

CONTEST ANNOUNCEMENT!

As the editor of RealPoetik I have tons of poems lined up so there is precious little room to discover new poets. However, I am going to run a contest now and then on a specific topic so that those who wish to be published in RealPoetik can have a crack. RealPoetik is an online journal with approximately 800 subscribers. Among those subscribers are some of the most famous poets of our time.

The Billy Collins Look-Alike Contest is for the best poem in the spirit and style of Billy Collins. Many poets seem to look down on Collins. I find this troubling. Very few can write as well as Collins can in his own medium. So I'm putting this to the test. Anybody who wants to try to write a Billy Collins style poem is welcome to try.

Send it to me at olsonjk@delhi.edu

The deadline is January 1, 2005.

Please keep the poems to twenty lines or less. Also, please clearly label your submission Billy Collins Contest in the subject line so that I don't inadvertantly toss it. If you would be so kind as to give me a one or two-line biography to accompany your poem that would be very welcome.

Good luck!

-- Kirby Olson

STILL, THERE'S A GLIMMER

The poet must be anthropologist, philosopher, architect, historian of ideas, political scientist, musician, painter, and something more, too. The poet must be an idiot. The poet must in fact be rather special in the sense used in regard to "special classes" because the poet cannot ever be financially remunerated for his/her labor-intensive struggles to embody the lyrical in a tightly-wrought form. Explode as verses might. Leaping from the page like an atomic cricket with a cheap Satanic outburst of mechanical melodies still it is only other poets who will listen. If good, the poet's reward is the envy of other poets, for no one is more susceptible to the Salieri Complex than poets. Tom Hunley's first book had a rather quixotic relation to the ludic syrrealism which seemed to flit about in the air like a feu follet in the 70s and whose greatest poets (Lux, Tate) are now worried about their first cardiac arrest & have begun to take it easy -- subsiding into a melancholy peroration on squirrel brains or whatever, hinting that they may eventually end up kneeling in the pews rather than trying for a laugh.

Hunley's new volume is something more resembling a 10 in rhythmic gymnastics, or pitching a no-hitter in the World Series. It asks us to look into our hearts, into the furthest deeps & find the amphibolous concepts lurking there. To cite the book would cause too much envy to bloom like spleen in our Crustacean palpitations whatever that means. So we've hidden the book from ourselves in raw fury.

Read the book if you can take it. Find it & see if the black box of your own foul heart can hinkmeister its finesse. It is a wondrous volume as difficult to bear gracefully as the ring for Gandolph -- to come out of the finer air & attempt to muddy Hunley's book with a far lesser one. I doubt if any poet can survive reading it without a sort of bitterness akin to that of models as one of their own steps down the runway and takes on the glory of Venus Aphrodite sweeping all hearts into her enormous empty pockets and leaving them bereft.

Still, There's A Glimmer. Tom C. Hunley. Wordtech Communications, 2004.

Left, Right

The argument of the left:
Because I feel like it.

The argument of the right:
Because that's the way it's always been.

It is because words are not actions that there is tremendous freedom in using them. I don't think words can be judged from an ethical viewpoint.

They should be judged from an aesthetic viewpoint.

In the ethical realm, only actions matter.

Open-Minded

Is it possible to be too open-minded? The idea of Nancy Reagan's that we should just say no turns out to be a pretty good idea after all. We should say no to wild sex, drug use, staying up all night smoking pot and taking LSD, and so on. It's a good idea to get to bed on time, to take regular exercise, to have long relationships, and to worship the one God.

Tolerance. How much drugs can your system tolerate? How much over-eating can your system tolerate?

The idea of standards -- as in the United States Department of Agriculture's standards, or hygienic standards -- should again become a conversation topic. What's good and bad for a community or for an individual?

Major aspects of the Democratic party appear to have completely abandoned the idea that there are standards, or universal laws. The idea of Locke's that a society owes its members at least the protection of human rights to life, liberty and property is a standard that I'd like to see come back into vogue. Many in the left would question property.

But Proudhon, at the end of his life, changed his silly thesis that "Property is Theft." He granted it in the book he was working on at the end of his life the status of the individual against the state. That if you gave all property to the state then there would be no bulwark against the state's power. He had completely reversed his youthful position in the one phrase that he is remembered by.

I'm increasingly intolerant of the word "tolerance." I find it intolerable that there are nations on this earth that feel you should shoot a woman in the head for the crime of learning to read. I find it intolerable that children should be beaten. Intolerable that a poet should not have the rights to freedom of speech. I'm with Bush in designating the axis of evil as a true axis of evil. The word Evil, and its proximity to the word Devil, is something I'd like to see return into the vocabulary -- while I'd like the word Tolerance to make its way to the door.

Tolerance, I'm almost certain, is a word fashioned by the anti-Christ for the usual reasons of perpetuation and dissemination of every kind of evil.

SURPRISE SEWERAGE TREATMENT PLANT VISIT

Tristan and I walked along the old railroad trail near Lynn's house
At the end of Sherwood Road

Yesterday we went to the Catskill Mountain Railroad Club
Four older men who'd built an amazing layout
Harbor, with boats
Small buildings
Trains going around through tunnels
Riikka said it helped keep the world the same forever for them
An attempt to hold the world still
It's in the Presbyterian church basement in Margaretville

To keep the theme of trains
Tristan and I walked the old road bed of the
Ontario & Western spur from Walton to Delhi

Snow came down in small pieces

Tristan in his blue snowsuit
Blue gloves
We went up the lane
Nothing much left of the railroad
Maybe one tie found off in the weeds
We came to the sewerage treatment plant

Dave Curley, the neighbor with the orange posts in front of his house
Gave us a half hour tour on a spur of the moment

The sludge is aerated & set upon by bacteria
It doesn't smell bad as anaerobic cess pools do
It is then strained through 20 ft. of sand
The better water is then treated chemically
& sent through more sand
Then sent through a process that chemically bonds the remaining filth
This filth then goes through a quarter million dollar pressing machine
Comes out in hard bricks like peat into truck beds
The beds are then taken to the county dump and dumped in the compost fields

The plant does a 150 tons a year
Of which 75% or more is milk fat waste
Since people now want non-fat from the Creamery in Hamden

50 years ago Curley said the trains brought in coal
& brought out barrels of milk
Packed with ice from the lakes
The station near what is now the Pizza Hut
A coopery nearby
Now all gone

Tristan and I said thanks to Dave Curley

We went back down the lonely path of the former railroad

Had a cinammon raisin bagel at the bagel place
Then home

Tristan waved from the window as I went to work
I blew him kisses backing up in the van

December 6, 2004

Thou shalt not steal. Exodus 20:15

Because God loves all his children, he wants his children to share with one another. If one is hungry or cold, it is God's plan that someone else should help him have clothes and a house to live in and food to eat.

It is right that any man or woman or boy or girl who really needs something should ask for it. But it is wrong for any person to take what belongs to someone else. That is stealing.

To keep more than one's share when someone else is in need, and to take what is not one's own, both make people unhappy.

The Ten Commandments: A First Religious Book, edited by Dr. Mary Alice Jones. Rand-McNally, 1962.

The ten commandments still command respect. They are the basis of morality in western culture. What is not often realized is that each of the commandments has not only a negative but also a positive. That is, not only must one not steal, but one must also share. Enormous surpluses such as all three of our major presidential candidates have are forbidden. Why did John Kerry require six houses with thirty plus rooms, and 750 million dollars? Why does Nader need in excess of 150 million dollars? Why does GWB need the same?

Shame!

We need to build a functional world economy that doesn't depend on oil. As a scarce and non-renewable resource it creates terror and worry. And yet almost no one spoke of ethanol during the last debate. Ethanol is made from grains. It is basically grain alcohol. Already most gasoline uses about ten percent ethanol. It has problems. In its pure form it leaks through the hoses at the gas pump. It wrecks cars as they are presently constituted if used in the present form, too. I suppose that if someone wants to get drunk on it they could. All of these are drawbacks.

Instead of throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into Iraq to secure the oil those same dollars could be used to develop alternative fuels.

"Thou shalt not covet." Exodus 20:17.

It is easy to want something that someone else has.

We should avert our eyes from the Mideast oil. If the oil wasn't so attractive, it is a good question whether our armies would be in that area. Switch to ethanol, hydrogen, solar power. This drains the terrorists of money, and provides a positive and renewal energy source for the west. It employs farmers. It took only ten years for the internet to get in place. A new energy solution needs to be put in place before our lust for oil leads us unto Hell.

HOW TO SPOT A BASTARD

In Shakespeare this is easy. The bastard is the bastard is the bastard. Not only are there actual bastards but there are de facto bastards. In the dictionary it indicates that a bastard can be of either sex. So Lear's daughters Goneril and Regan for instance are bastards. Even rodents probably treat their parents better than do Goneril and Regan. Whether or not there is filial piety is how you can spot a bastard.

In the Henry V tetrad one begins to think that Henry V is a bastard. He goes whoring and participates in an armed robbery. But he turns around and joins his father in the war against Hotspur and his ilk and saved England. Hotspur's father, meanwhile, abandons his son. the commitment must go both ways between parents and children.

"Honor thy mother and father," is the fourth commandment. It is a crucial one. Those who hold to this commandment are good people. Those who do not are bastards in every sense of the term.

When we think of George W. Bush we can see that he does honor his mother and father, and the sentiment is returned. Bin Laden on the other hand has broken all relations with his natural family. Bin Laden is a bastard, but George W. Bush is not. In Shakespeare almost all the wars are started by bastards.

It's true that some people have rotten parents and find it difficult to honor them. In this case we can still find a good person in them if they honor our common father. And if they love the earth then they honor our common mother. It's the rare person who can do this without loving their own earthly parents but I think it's still possible.

Few people can still distinguish between a good person and a bad person but that's how you do it.

EVOLUTION

The Tyrannosaurus Rex
Doesn't like sex
He rends mammals with his teeth & claws
He doesn't respect any laws
He rips up bridges
& drinks up lakes
He kills everybody
& avoids the wakes
The dinosaur is a thing of thunder
Close the curtains:
He was also a blunder.