July 'River of Stones'

Lots of people are joining, about to toss pebbles of poetry --- haiku-like moments of noticing, meditating, writing --- into the river. You should too:

Why you should join the river: Because having a notebook, or a blog, and a vow to write one small stone in it each day can help you keep a sense of wonder about the world. Deciding to take part in the July challenge, to notice something each day and write about it, sets in motion that willingness to reach out - that willingness to really look and listen to the world - and to stand in awe.

On the black river,
a pair of great-crested grebe nod
towards the ceremonies of spring.

Kate Noakes

Kaspalita Thompson and Fiona Robyn, beautiful, newly-wedded couple, are the inspirations behind River of Stones.

Documentary: "Call of Life: Facing Mass Extinction"

View this movie at calloflife.org

Watching this, while of course I already knew, but the summer heat, the late hour, half in the dreamtime, I understood at a deeper level. While a pessimistic part of me does not believe that we can change the path of destiny that we are creating for ourselves as the world-force we are, as a species, the speakers in this video offer hope at the end. Already the facts and issues raised in this video has brought into focus a deep anxiety, a life-threatening worry, something indefinable, troubling and thus Call of Life is a life-changing video for me. I urge you to watch it.

And, though we are not world leaders, nor run vast multi-nationals, we are the grassroots. Dance, drum, meditate daily on mass extinction...on unimaginable numbers of species dying out, life force, soul fleeing an uninhabitable world...

And march when there are marches, and sign petitions, and write letters, emails, and post in all the places you can.

Synopsis of the documentary:

Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction

Director: Monte Thompson | Producer: Chera Van Burg
Genre: Documentary | Produced In: 2010 | Story Teller's Country: United States
Tags: Ecology, Environment, Global, Globalization, Spiritual Awareness

Synopsis: If current trends continue, scientists warn that within a few decades at least HALF of all plant and animal species on Earth will disappear forever. “Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction” is the first feature documentary to investigate the growing threat to Earth’s life support systems from this unprecedented loss of biodiversity. Through interviews with leading scientists, psychologists, historians, and others, the film explores the causes, the scope, and the potential effects of the mass extinction, but also looks beyond the immediate causes of the crisis to consider how our cultural and economic systems, along with deep-seated psychological and behavioral patterns, have allowed and continue to reinforce the situation, and even determine our response to it. “Call of Life” tells the story of a crisis not only in nature, but also in human nature, a crisis more threatening than anything human beings have ever faced before.

From my blogroll:

Mass Extinction Math

by Timothy Morton

So if the previous mass extinction 55 million years ago took two thousand years as a result of 2 gigatons per year of carbon being released:

Does that mean that this one, given 30 gigatons per year, will take fifteen times faster, namely about 130 years?

Does anyone know how the math of mass extinction works?

Silver-Tint Photo

...the mask was exactly what she was searching for, exactly
what she needed: a face threaded over her face,
a light threaded over her light.

You speak, and the mask begins to speak,
and the listening takes fire.

Dale Favier

                  Slipping away, between
      restraints.

_
(click photos for larger size)

Dale's Mask slightly paraphrased, a change of pronoun

Stone #50: Is Rosette's

After the rain, roses everywhere, their thorn-bitten thick lips, petals falling like tricks, lipstick red pistils around their bushes.

...

(a wee note to myself, if you ever want to see them, just email me for the key)

Breathtaking Poetry Theory

In a book review, Ali Alizadeh reviews Maria Takolander and Claire Potter | Cordite Poetry Review, I found this paragraph:

Badiou’s strategy for a philosophical investigation of the arts – and of avant-garde poetry in particular – relies on a belief that art is one of the key conditions for the emergence of universal truths. Accordingly, a poetry capable of hosting such an exigent possibility must negate both the mimetic impulse (to represent/express emotions, images, experiences, etc.) as well as the lyrical demands of conventional prosody such as form and sound, the unity and cohesion of an authorial voice, poetic subject matter, etc. As Elie During has recently written in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts (Acumen, 2010), “Badiou’s underlying poetics is at once anti-mimetic and anti-lyrical. Hermeneutics and aesthetics are thereby rejected in the same stroke.”

It's been awhile since I read any breathtaking poetry theory, so this hit a good spot. I'm in the middle of Deleuze and Guattari's, Thousand Plateaus, a text that surely by anyone's standards becomes poetry at times, and is full of breathtaking poetry theory (though incidentally, or by inference, or by who it inspires), at least it keeps sending my imagination into its outer limits, even on second and third reads, which may take me into the Fall at the rate I'm going, but Badiou is on the list for next.

Cryptic Messages to Self

Cryptic messages to self. Do you do this? It's so easy with a cell phone to send memos back to yourself for later. I sent this message to myself by iPhone at the end of January, so it must mean something. But what? Clearly I was using the app, Dragon Speaking, which sometimes is a bit strange, and didn't correct the writing. Was I meditating? Did I just wake up from a dream?

Who knows. Seems to be instructions of some kind for recording a speaking, perhaps...


Now I know was thinking over in between the molecules recess voice and then become waves and then let it pass through and then let themselves to be become part of the speaking a care in the sound of the passes through the M waves like wave as you like service that glass that means of angels

Untitled(2) by Eduardo Cuadrado

direct link: Untitled(2) by Eduardo Cuadrado

Eduardo, I am moved beyond comprehension by your Untitled (2). Your sculptures? Realist, the realism of poverty. Yes, I know this world. A beaten world; people who are usually ignored in the busy city. The shadows. The shadows who you have given solid form to in metal and other materials appear everywhere, as sculptures. Magnified. They are worthy of focus. They have their stories. People stop and look for a moment. It is strange. They are the poor, lost, downtrodden, forgotten; it is as if they call to their gods in the moments of silent suffering you have represented. They ask the existential questions. Why? Why me? How did this happen? How do I rise from this place of despair? I am in tears. I want to protect all of these beautiful people from the harsh life they have been cast into by circumstance, drug abuse, violence, or a soft incessant falling away of belief in the status quo until there is only raw existence left.

This is a great video. You disabled comments, so I started writing a response here...

Besides the stark, troubling opening shot, a video of an installation on the street with a doorway, the figures are all male. They wear suits or trench coats: perhaps they are white collar workers who have fallen through the cracks in culture. Some of them are installed where they might have worked before getting laid off or fired for whatever reason; or perhaps it was bankruptcy. The men in Cuadrado's film, his sculptures, have intellects, you can see that. They are conscious of their predicament. They are worn down by life. But they have not blown their minds out with drugs or alcohol; they are fully aware of where they are. In their faces of despair, desperation, futility, humiliation, sorry we see a deep grief.

That grief burns in my soul; whether it does in all viewers, all of those who witness these works, I don't know.