Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth
says biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, member of the centre
for human evolution studies, Rutgers University, New Jersey.
After the lust settles, testosterone & oestrogen take a breather,
dopamine (euphoria), noradrenaline (racing hearts, palms sweaty),
serotonin (loss of appetite, obsessing) kick into action.
Love’s burst of chemicals tend to time out over time,
but two hormones bind the hearts as soul mates: oxytocin
gets you attached, vasopressin less promiscuous & primed.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day or a hormone,
Romeo Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo & not dopamine,
your sweet little hands sweaty with noradrenaline
sorry about eating the plum in the fridge but studies indicate
given extra vasopressin the promiscuous male
meadow mole may become a very faithful mate.
[A poem from my collection Requiem (Picaro Press) on torture as state terrorism in past and present.]
The Schools of Class. A Thesaurus
Therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.
– Charles Dickens, ‘American Notes for General Circulation’ (1850)
Penal torturers have their own poetic
thesaurus understood across time & space.
The spread eagle crucifies for eight hours
& leaves you paralysed for days. The tube gag, originally to make uppity
women bite their tongue, forces breath
or bloodied foam through a small hole
in the wooden plug. The scavenger’s daughter
binds you in foetal position till you scream
with cramp. The water pit is a dark cell
with water to your waist where sleeping
is drowning. The cat slashes into the back
with special knots, stops for some extra
salt water bite & resumes to block the wounds
from healing & provide innocent maggots
with a warm home. (100 lashes for singing
or smiling while on the chain). The everlasting
staircase or cockchafer is a treadmill, progress
merging punishment with profit, pain,
the monotony of milling our fine & daily bread.
Further progress moves the site of power’s stark
inscriptions from body to brain. Names are removed
for numbers, charges never laid, shoes felted,
isolation imposed & twenty hour lights,
all self sabotaged with windowless walls
& hoods. The suspects rendered unto democratic
Caesars are outsourced to the white silences
of black prisons where they’re pornographically
stacked in naked pyramids, sexually humiliated,
strapped to boards & water surfed over
gagged mouths & desperate drowning eyes.
Will blind history be the judge, prosecute
the penal lingua franca with no right
to remain silent on the rude question posed
by its secret subtext: can these schools of pain
ever end before class is dismissed? Can class
be dismissed without new schools of pain?
Here’s a very interesting webchat between Joanna Macy (The Work that Reconnects), psychologist Chris Johnstone and Transition movement founder Rob Hopkins. The conversation deals with ‘Active Hope – How to Face the Mess We’re In Without Going Crazy’.
Some topics touched on in the webchat:
The three great stories you can choose between in making sense of the world: Business as Usual, The Great Unravelling, The Great Turning
The inner voice of caring-for-the-world everybody is born with (Bodhisattva, bodhi-citta)
Active hope (the process of doing, action) versus denying/pollyanna ‘hope’
No need for hope, just care enough and you will act (Macy)
Listening to what’s coming out of your own mouth/mind, then helping others listen to theirs
Don’t proselytise, it’s the aliveness of people in movements that attracts
Forget the numbers/majorities fetish: often consciousness shifts when things are bleakest
Art and poetry are becoming more central to our expressing our immense grief/rage and our love for the planet
[The photo was taken in Wingello State Forest near here]
Richie Havens died this week. Here is his enduring legacy, his opening of the Woodstock festival in 1969 with ‘Freedom’. Speaking for an era and and an eternity. The urge to freedom arising from oppression, loneliness, despair, power-within… In such art, such poetry, such music, I find political roots, strength, consolation, stronger than any political tract could ever be since it goes to the whole person, the body, the soul, not just the left brain…
[Above cartoon is by Polyp]. Further to the previous post on global inequality, a few facts from Forbes Magazine’s latest figures for 2013 on global billionaires (the list does not include royalty or political ruling families):
Number of global billionaires 2013: 1,426 (210 more than 2012)
Net aggregate worth : $5.4 trillion (2012: $4.6 trillion; 5.4 trillion is 5.4 thousand billion or $ 5,400,000,000,000)
Number of women billionaires : 138 (34 more than 2012)
US billionaires : 442
Chinese billionaires : 122 (plus Hong Kong 39; ten years ago China had none)
Russian billionaires : 110
German billionaires : 58
Indian billionaires : 55
Brazilian billionaires : 46
Turkish billionaires : 43
UK billionaires : 38
Canadian billionaires : 29
Indonesian billionaires : 25
Japanese billionaires : 22
Australian billionaires : 22
Australian billionaires (in order): Rinehart, Glasenberg, Packer, Forrest, Lowy, Triguboff, Gandel, Neilson, Ramsay, Hains, Stokes, Perron, Fox, Hintze, Buckeridge, Lew, Walker, Ainsworth, Ingham, Harvey, Bingweh, Van Lieshout.
The global top ten billionaires have a combined (official) wealth of $451.5 billion. They are (in order): Carlos Slim Helu (Mex, $73 b), Bill Gates (US, $67 b), Amancio Ortega (Sp, $57 b), Warren Buffett (US, $53.5 b), Larry Ellison (US, $43 b), Charles & David Koch (US, $34 b each), Li Ka-shing (HK, $ 31 b), Liliane Bettencourt (Fr, $30 b), Bernard Arnault (Fr, $29 b).
Of course these are only the official wealth figures. According to a former chief economist at the global management consulting company McKinsey (in The Guardian Weekly 12-18/4/2013, p.1), these ruling class representatives and their fellows in government have between 21 and 32 trillion dollars stashed away in tax havens out of reach of national tax systems. That’s $32,000,000,000,000. More than enough to wipe out global poverty, fund a guaranteed minimum income for all, the transition to renewable energy systems…
What these people (perhaps 0.000004 % of the global population) decide to do or not do with their capital decides the shape of our lives and futures. This is where the real power lies, not with the politicians we are constantly distracted by. Their investment criteria are not our well-being or that of the planet or of future generations. Nor the reduction of suffering, poverty, disempowerment. They have only two criteria: profit and power.
Let’s leave the last word to the wonderful Nina Simone:
[Excellent summary by Jason Hickel of global inequality. Two hundred years of capitalism have resulted in 200 individuals owning as much wealth as 3.5 billion people, with markets assuring poor countries' resources and wealth flow to us in the rich countries... When will the 3.5 billion wake up, I wonder? 'Time to change the rules' indeed...]
[This poem has just been published in Stoned Crows & other Australian icons, ed. by Julie Chevalier & Linda Godfrey, at Spineless Wonders press. The volume by many writers and poets, and focussed on an irreverent look at Australian 'icons', will be launched during the upcoming Sydney Writers Festival. Given the density of allusions and Australian idiolect, the poem will, for the most part, only be comprehensible to Australian readers. An iconostasis, an 'icon stand', is a wall of icons separating church nave from sanctuary in Eastern Christianity and typically has three openings or doors. I took the photo of Australian war medals at the Anzac Memorial in Melbourne.]
iconostasis
first door: god’s eye webcam
toyota samsung miele ge maccas all sitting together in their second life on a screen in a gaming den in seoul chewing kimchi with roo & a fair shake of the sauce bottle as the webcam scams in over the opera house mumbling NO WAR in a laconic sort of way iphoned out to all the second gen boat people selling smack out west to seventh gen boat people lebs & serbians wearing maori tats on their harleys like hopper on speed or hogan on tim tams as the st johns st pauls st andrews sandstone bogans prepare for their laidback lawyer lives in mosman woollahra cayman islands & the odd pole-dancer taken to a long lunch at the emirates marquee in a pavlova fascinator stumbles her 20 inch stilettos over the dropped vc of the latest warrior & mate to come home in a flag with a 21 gun salute for the lanky governor mate in canary yellow always good for going down mines before they collapse like the oz top order or collateral debt obligations to keep the home air cons burning the sun setting in the west as it still does but who knows for how long so we might take a punt on it if we’ve got a tip or two on the likely moods of the southern ocean index raising a dust storm in the stock exchange of our hearts big as phar lap’s ghost in the fifth at flemington hong kong racing round uluru stoned as a schoolie zoned out as a pokie pensioner cloned as a yank in an akubra made in china licking a wasabi chiko roll along bondi beach coz it sucks like harold holt’s yellow peril submarine we all live in
second door: glossolalia
visuals: face like a dropped pie head like a chewed mintie useless as tits on a bull useless as a letterbox on a tombstone couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag couldn’t organise a fart in a curry house if he fell into a barrel full of tits he’d come up sucking his thumb
as popular as a cross-city tunnel wouldn’t shout in a shark attack full as a corby boogie board bag vanished like a fart in a fan factory
sound check: rain on an iron roof, a creaky gate/an outdoor dunny door banging in the wind/driving over a cow grate/a screen door slamming/galahs coming in before sunset/geckos chattering on a ceiling/splat of a cane toad on bitumen/squeak of a hills hoist/swipe of a credit card/magpies warbling/yobs screaming fuck off poofter from their holden commodore/spreading disease with the greatest of ease /a little each day /is a good recipe/it’s time
song: love me drizza, love me kubra/love me sheila, love me clacka/love me wanka, love me heidegga/love me warnie, love me horny/love me vb, love me tv/love me reffo, love me biffo/love me smoko, love me choko/love me porno, love me adorno/love me ute, love me root
third door: the history biffos trinity
white armband
rum rebellion: officers remove an unsatisfactory governor
eureka stockade: heroic uprising of battlers against unjust authorities of the time
gallipoli: birth of the nation in the heroic sacrifice of our diggers
vietnam: another heroic sacrifice of our diggers in defence of freedom
lambing flats riots: the what?
cronulla riots: minor tussle over correct female beach attire
black armband
rum rebellion: a section of the officer mafia corners the rum market
eureka stockade: the volk arises in a rage over mining royalties
gallipoli: the volk scrambles up a faux-trojan crag to kill turks for the british empire
vietnam: the volk hacks thru faux-coppola jungles killing vietnamese for us empire
lambing flats riots: the volk rids the labour market of competing chinamen
cronulla riots: the flag-wrapped volk bashes beach-staining lebs
grey armband
what: ever
pass: the prawns
what’s: the score have a nice
