.
How long? The shadow of a doubt moves
Across a door in the imagined dark
Of the ancient cranium, a dim drafty space.
Unwilling to turn and glimpse the blind exorcist’s face,
Unconditional suspenders of disbelief,
Back-to-Normals shop to live, drive to shop;
So a busy world spins by my window again
Till buying hour stops, and night noise
Falls through the white rain and hangs there.
Sky glows red with last few searching tracer lights,
Infant tenement memories and other spectral
Mystery silhouettes, shifting in the mind
Between the first and last breaths: a blank disassembling;
Between the first flashback –- a brick airshaft,
Carlight Zero diving, wartime voices distant –-
And the evaporation of the tribe: the faint farewell, soft laughter,
The great mobilization of ghosts
In the grey area. Id est: somewhere before dawn.
Airplane silhouette: image by Jussi Paju, 2006
Divergence of 7.7mm and 20mm shells fired from Japanese A6M2 "Zeke" (or "Zero") from Akagi flight group, c. 1941-42: image by Anynobody, 2007
Japanese Navy "Zero" fighter takes off from aircraft carrier Asagi, on its way to attack Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December 1941: photo by Japanese military personnel (US Navy)
This one is subtly wild. The Japanese Zero motif really works on me. I've seen interviews with surviving kamikaze pilots..
ReplyDeletecall me crazy, but..
:)
Lanny,
ReplyDeleteThe Japanese WW II military mentality remains a mystery to me, but then so do all military mentalities (perhaps it was a bad ROTC stint that did it).
Have you ever checked out the amazing film "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On"?
The kamikaze mentality is a hybrid form of the old bushido code of the samurai, or was supposed to be so.. Suicidal gestures like this are designed to inflict not only casualties but to create awe and fear. It is a total weaponization of the body toward a supposed end.
ReplyDeleteThe kamikaze' pilots were taught that "their cockpits were their swords" and that they were samurai.
It has a sere, almost insectoid feel to it, but then, humanity is such a special critter, even in terms of our energy consumption.
Out of all the animals in the world, the vast majority get about one billion heartbeats for a life,
the slower they go, the longer the life, like whales that are found with spearpoints embedded in them from the 19th century. The human animal gets about 2 billion heartbeats. Completely unprecendented.
The term 'singularity' has been kicked around alot in the sciences
(signses) to connote an ionisation
of the instrumental toward some benchmark of consciousness, but the human itself is already that singularity within the animal kingdom itself, as was the animal kingdom itself from those early protoctistan denizens..
This whole suicide thing for the sake of the abstraction layer should tell us something about its very nature, polarized and polarizing, is part of its basic identity.
The warrior, in terms of don juan,
must always be on guard for these contentious states, and remain transparent, poised, indifferent except to possibility!!
(or something)"i guess"
[shrugs]
cluck cluck
:)
Lanny, "Sere, insectoid" strikes to the heart of the freak in evolution, the mutation, probably accidental, leading to the arid, withered chain-mail of that abstraction layer we seem to possess which makes the bushido code intelligible (if not attractive) to us--"sere" beings like that Sebastian in Blade Runner, who aged seven times the normal rate. A Saint Sebastian of how many heartbeat arrows before, was it Roy Batty, crushed his skull in an android palm?
ReplyDeleteThat is a word from way back in the Indo European flood plain denoting the dead vegetation of the drought periods. Each no doubt recalled as singular, though they must have been myriad. Good word for the human as a dried-out exotic introduction.
Sere I can get. Not the strike potential, however. Heart-retarding meds limit the action to a heart beat only every two seconds or so, twould be good for zen archery or putting in golf, but for samurai, no-go--one of the meds is a beta blocker that reduces adrenalin production to a standstill, no fight or flight reaction, just skulk, the savannah a memory, the pavement bad enough. Even so, my golly, a billion is still a lot... of risk, when you think about it.
As a lad I admired the bravery and skill and madness of the Zero pilots and somewhere in the lost archives of eternity there are hundreds of drawings of them done in those war years. Do (and probably did) grasp that the kamikaze attackers were a special breed--or maybe just the same insectoid dry mutant freak weaponized android strain, only moreso. At any rate they were gutty dudes, though does an android have a gut, no they must have visceral "thought" digestion baskets, automata don't eat or... whatever.
PS. Speaking of whatever, and while we're talking, do please let that cat of yours back in the house, on compassionate grounds, whatever the offense (is that Vadda?). (The slugs on the photo'd outdoor food sent the local SPCA branch reeling!)
You come here! and teach this little shit! not to shit and piss on me!
ReplyDeleteHer name is Anise and she has ruined 3 couched to date! I can't AFFORD to be compassionate anymore. We put her in the basement in Winter, but she is certifiable. I love her, I give her hugs, kisses, consoling words, but if we let her into the house, some night, she'll strike!
KAMIKAZE STYLE!
She has actually shit
right on my back! while I slept!
heheh
Man, you are cool, we should have beers, or bourbons, or teas, or movies.
mi casa su casa.
:)