Moon Memo: I Here Declare The End Of The War!
Good morning. It's Saturday, and I'm at the usual place at 7 a.m., doing laptop club. Laptop club is my name for this: sitting in a coffee show with a cappuccino, playing around on the laptop. I have to leave laptop club with something to show for it: a new poem (which I've written) or an article reviewed for work (done) or life stuff evaluated (a continuous process, of course).
Usual I sit with my laptop and listen to the conversation around me, a little blunted by a pair of cheap headphones. My old ones (pinky) served me well for a few years for this.
Have new headphones today. A steal on Amazon. My old ones were starting to crack, and I was planning to replace them with noise canceling ones. I had a budget, and a special on some top of the line ones happened cutting their price in half, so I ordered and they fast tracked.
New headphones have noise canceling, which is great for making the world a little blunted, but it also makes me feel like I've got a bit of a head cold. I wonder if this is normal. Like my head has been filled with cotton, and I am cut off from my own thoughts. That's no good when all you are doing is trying to chirp away from the world a little while. I don't know if I would have noise canceling on without music, to be honest. Makes the world way too insular. Just turn off the world a little bit, friends. You don't have to do that to the point where I feel sick.
Otherwise, good sound. Listening to Sunn o))) right now, and I'm in love with the way this rattles in ways other headphones don't. Got them with a ridiculous deal. Accepting that they are more than I could ever want, but are everything I need. Covered up the branding, because nothing says steal me like obvious branding.
I try to cover up most branding, especially when at work. It feels shitty to be walking around in Nikes and MacBooks and Beats headphones when the people you work with are hungry. I have to examine that. What does it mean to be doing ok when you work with people who are hungry?
Reading the paper. Which feels so archaic to say. I'm reading my RSS feed and the New York Times (yes, I give money to the enemy. Every paper has an agenda, and the NYTimes agenda is old money and the democratic war machine. So I read my enemy, with the knowledge that they are my enemy.). Letting the world into my soul a little bit. The children of Gaza now wading through rivers of shit in Rafa.
"85 percent of the population has been displaced. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people are now living in squalid, cramped conditions in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost region, right along the border with Egypt.
The long history of Palestinians being displaced during their 75 years of conflict with Israel has left their leaders and their Arab neighbors worried that an exodus of Gazans into Egypt would become permanent.
To protect itself from such a scenario, and to forestall an influx of Hamas and other Gaza militants, Egypt has spent years fortifying its seven-and-a-half mile border with Gaza."
Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem called Wichita Vortex Sutra. At the height of our country's adventure in Vietnam (it's hard to call it the Vietnam war. America was the end of a long line of colonizers in Vietnam, dropping bombs and napalm on the poor. When I visited Vietnam the tour guides called it The American Years. A period of one enemy being replaced by another.) he was driving with his friends through the midwest, and into a tape recorder he intoned a spell to end the war.
"I call all Powers of imagination
to my side in this auto to make Prophecy,
all Lords
of human kingdoms to come
Shambu Bharti Baba naked covered with ash
Khaki Baba fat-bellied mad with the dogs
Dehorahava Baba who moans Oh how wounded, How wounded
Sitaram Onkar Das Thakur who commands
give up your desire
Satyananda who raises two thumbs in tranquility
Kali Pada Guha Roy whose yoga drops before the void
Shivananda who touches the breast and says OM
Srimata Krishnaji of Brindaban who says take for your guru
William Blake the invisible father of English visions
Sri Ramakrishna master of ecstasy eyes
half closed who only cries for his mother
Chitanya arms upraised singing & dancing his own praise
merciful Chango judging our bodies
Durga-Ma covered with blood
destroyer of battlefield illusions
million faced Tathagata gone past suffering
Preserver Harekrishna returning in the age of pain
Sacred Heart my Christ acceptable
Allah the compassionate one
Jaweh Righteous One
all Knowledge-Princes of Earth-man, all
ancient Seraphim of heavenly Desire, Devas, yogis
& holymen I chant to--
Come to my lone presence
into this Vortex named Kansas,
I lift my voice aloud,
make Mantra of American language now,
I here declare the end of the War!"
"Language: People were being tricked into basing their faith on magic; if something was said, it became real. The war was real because our leaders said it was, just as in India, when mantras were chanted, the gods became real simply through the process of reciting their names.
But Ginsberg’s point is well made: If the government can use black magic to secure a majority supporting the war, he could use his own form of magic to sway a majority to oppose it. Once again, the key was language: Someone had to step forward and declare an end to the war."
I have spent the last week writing poems based on my reaction to the current situation in Gaza (war seems so trivial a war when it's only one power that is causing any death), and trying to humanize the sufferers. Maybe it's my own kind of magic. Maybe I'm trying to end the war. It has the inevitable failure of focus. William Stafford: War is the enemy, not any man.
Staring at the screen. The rubble dead childrens and the crying fathers. The camps on the borders reminding me of all the missing tent cities of portland, wondering where those folks went. I do my part of the work.
End of laptop club. Sending this to you, my dear friends, from a coffee shop in Portland on a winter Saturday. The caffeine does its work, and the words. Love you all so much.
Onward and upward!
Misha Lynn Moon
