Baudelaire in the Underworld

 

The sensual, but sans the usual fluff,

may flow in love made to slow

the dash of time to what is bound 

to abide, bidding adieu to everything 

that wouldn't stand what beauty brings

from within one's till now sleepig heart,

suddenly filled like a flower, crowning grass,

in the glory of becoming a new living light.

The sand of moribund and fevered senses,

dusting off once majestic and regal mountains

bruised by cutting storms and countless winds,

builds in vain its way too early shapless castles

by the shores of ancient seas which can never mind

the horrid, screechy howling of the forlorn soul

which its merchants exchanged for a hollow image

on the caving wall that grinds her eye to grime and smut.

A Platonist’s Requiem for the USSR and Hymn for the American Dream

 

How, in truth, could there ever be a perfect, just,

and beautiful Union between soulless mates?

 

“Expropriators of the souls, unite with the soulless!”

was the barbarians’ battle cry.

 

“It’s the economy, stupid!”

 

It did not take the materialists in charge of the socialist countries

that long to figure out that, in principle, nothing did or should

prevent them from turning the vast material assets of the socialist state

and nation into their own material wealth. From the material

and materialistic point of view, their decision and calculus

were impeccable. Primitive accumulation and new neo-feudal

primitivism based on the most cynical theft and betrayal was a go.

 

Both the US and the USSR

                        or the Soviet Union

            loved to sing

                                    and preach and be

of the perfect,

                        lasting Union

                                    on earth under Heaven

            of the perfect, splendid, happy communion

that transforms whoever enters

                        into its pot, mouth, or cauldron—

            magical keyhole,

                                    shaped up like a dream,

the chalice brimming with

                                    alchemic wine—

into the best one can be,

                                    the best ecstatic lover,

            the best soldier,

                                    the best astronaut,

                        or a new Zatopek

who ties up almost any distance

            like a piece of art

made of the body

and the human spirit

            as far as to the mortals            Gods allow

and by which space and time,

            fabulously twanged and rippled,

 

could in awe                begin anew.

 

But with whom?        

Oh, with whom?

With whom and how?

 

Both the US and the Soviet Union

used to woo and teach

of the perfect,

                        lasting Union

of love, happiness, and bliss

that would come

to anyone who who’d come and join.

 

Until suddenly, or was it slowly,

                                    a slow numbing & killing off

                        of its heart and soul,

each of them denied

                        and denied their own and to be one’s own,

the Soviet Union wasn’t,

                                    wasn’t that one promised Union

            or any other

                                                anymore.

Unloved & unloving,

                        abandoned,

                                    having abandoned

            its own soul

                        which its doctrine didn’t

allow to exist in the least.

 

Can they—could they ever care—

for what they’d done away with?

 

“What matters,” these new lovers,

these new unconscious, yet epigonic Lysiai,

would preach on behalf of the new Utopia,

whether now or in the end,

            if nothing is

                                    and nothing matters if it’s not

                        not more,

            not more

than matter,

                        matter soulless

and thus matter dead,

which means that all that’s human & live

dies anyway,

 

                        becoming nothing,      senseless nothing

where all must for any human end?”

 

            How could such a Union last?

 

            How could a union of soulless lovers last?

 

            How much for a soul?

 

            But whatever is paid, it’s always a fraud,

            always way too little

                        for what it is priceless

            as nothing else could ever match

            its birthright, cost and worth.

 

For it’s written: you may denigrate, disown and deny your soul,

                        even as if without selling her out,

                                    to the devil or any other bidder or buyer,

just by laying her aside forsaken by the road

                        for the first random thief to carry off your treasure,

but you cannot do that

                                                with no fatal harm or loss to yourself

                        or to anything you may ever try

and without grossly denigrating yourself

and thus others too

                                    and without deep down disowning yourself

either soon or only a bit later.

 

But always mortally and deeply.

 

For no flower can grow and bloom

if its roots are cut or mutilated

            as when a teaching of death ousts the songs of souls.

 

Platonic Meditation on Time, Odysseus, and Ferlinghetti

 

“They are really fascist forms of underground government

making people believe something but the truth.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Underwear, Starting from San Francisco, 1961

 

“Time drops to the ground

like a shadow from a tree,”

wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti

and I write now in the wake

of his passing on February 22, 2021,

less than a month to his 102^nd birthday.

 

And if time from which Ferlinghetti himself

just ran out is a like a shadow from a tree,

why don’t we see that mighty divine tree

under which, in the hues and darks,

we, mortals, live, passing one another

to and from acts and moments

 

as if we too were of the sightless shades?

But then Ferlinghetti went to say

that the eternal tree had been cut down

“by an unknown carpenter beyond the sea”

who thus could be Jesus or Set, the One

Who Made a Coffin for His Brother Osiris,

 

the God of the Dead, the Egyptian Dionysus,

cut to pieces and then collected by Isis

except for the one small, devoured piece

that she needed to replace with a stand-in

to become pregnant in a new and totally

unprecedented, immaculate precedent and way

 

by this Sun who moved for good to the other world.

But how many know or would suspect how much

of Egyptian there is deep down in American woman

unless you do truly walk one day across the compound

of Rosicrucian Park with the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum,

the Rosicrucian Labyrinth, Alchemy Exhibit and Garden,

 

and the Rosicrucian Temple in San Jose in the Silicon Valley?

But Ferlinghetti, this new American-Italian prophet

of the new American city and its underground truths

also added (in the same piece) that the tree (the coffin)

was made into our boats that swing between poetry and sex,

making it hard for the souls thus carried to see the Hell of this world.

 

Yet elsewhere, while still alive, he asked this: “Do the dead

know what time it is?” Are the dead, indeed, still concerned

about the shades out of which Eternity, branching out

through all that is, makes time and its ceaseless change?

But Death, whether Osiris, Jesus, the carpenter, or Set or Saturn,

surely must pay attention to the living shades and time

 

for it (or they?) must always be on time, knowing when

to strike and when to collect and when to move like a Charon

all who need to cross and be transferred either to the VIP Bliss Club

or to the pledged eternal torture chambers of sadistic and fascist Satans

of which the generous Churches kindly tell tales even to the little ones.

Only the most depraved can attach to the immortality of the soul

 

and thus her divinity and goodness such a lie of her eternal evil,

infinite cruelty, continuing destruction, and complete separation

from her godly self, leaving of the soul and time not more

than hollow husks, empty shades, the waste of cast-off scales

of the Cosmic Dragon and the Phoenix, the breathing Tree

of the Illuminated Universe, the rot of her deadened leaves.

 

But elsewhere still, even on the slab in Jack Kerouac Alley,

next to his City Lights Bookstore Ferlinghetti also says

that poetry too is but a shadow: “Poetry is the shadow

cast by our streetlight imaginations.” Do we live just

in the shades by the shades as shades—shades of the dead

prematurely, already, and thus terminally always

 

in a world where the soul and life itself became an outside

lonely lamppost on a street of a modern inflamed city?

Or can one somehow still collect from the shade the light,

its source, its own golden fountain if, to that shade, the soul

is and remains no more than only—a shadow of the very soul?

And so Odysseus too, having stolen the dildo or “the bone”

or, as the literati call it, the Palladium of Greek Isis,

 

the Great Goddess, from Troy, went on to disseminate

a gash, a rupture—new orders and new times—some of the last

bold mingling and mixing between the gods and the mortals,

brandishing the sculpted member—the key to Empire and power,

as his Golden Bough that buys both free entry to and free exit

from Hades and Hell, all the while, along with shrewd Homer,

 

making sure to call it as Cyclopes’ Nobody for the vulgar and profane

either an “oar” or a “fan” or a “stern” to which, for Sirens, he was tied.

And all this just to plant himself on countless daughters of the Sun

and other foreign Gods on his way, thus preparing his progeny

of Latinus, Italus, Romos, Anteias, Ardeias, the rulers over the Etruscans,

for Aeneas and for the rise of Rome, blending the genes of Gods

 

with the two mutually hostile bloods of Greeks and Asiatic Trojans

while making even his lovers and wives, according to the records,

unsure and confused which of his sons was born with whom

and which of them each was then to marry and have in turn,

thus turning also all the Penelopes, Calypsos, Circes as if into one.

And yet, all this time of trying and tasting all these foreign sprites

 

on his epic, roundabout, and scenic way back home, the deadly rage

and hate worthy of a devil true from Hell never ever left him,

madly gnawing on all his intestines, against all the other suitors,

all his other stand-ins, and for the other living sons of his war

companions who all perished on his ships when coming home,

those whom his Penelope kept and entertained in her court

 

as her “darling ducks” who couldn’t resist her cooing spells.

And then all this under many spinning lies of sly and wily

Odysseus and Homer to make the many idolize

and sympathize with the greedy and pitiless tyrant

who does not want to let others live, not even

Penelope’s female slaves whom he coldly strangles.

 

By character and by design it then became hard

to disentangle chaff from the seeds and

the shadows on that hollow’s walls

from the light that makes us grow

and leads us up and forward

except for the one morale:

 

to found and seed such an Empire

one has to try to get some Goddess

into bed before she turns

him briskly back into swine.

Such is then the key privileged,

Empire’s great mystery, conundrum.

 

And for this the chosen aspirant

must bring this Great Goddess, the Queen of Death

along some bough or bone, carved by a forked lightning

or by stealth or by war or some plague-ridden crime

bearing on a kind of death— “souls” already spoiled,

and maimed, disfigured, defaced, displaced, marred

 

so that there would be no longer any Tree,

just the refuse down to remain and stay,

after peeling off the light, peeling it off the mind and human heart,

impregnated with the plague, the disease, and so leaving

only the one downward, nether way to the caught & condemned.

But I am just one solitary Platonic grinding my little warbling tune

 

like an ax by the shore of the ancient Crooked River

that changed and reversed her winding course

through the labyrinthine flow of rushing time

in the way in which words bolt to a folded verse

as if trying to fly from its end back

where lies its holy source.

Americans and Russians

We are witnessing the Greatest Russian Tragedy. Now.

 

“Can anyone explain why the descendants of Vlasov paint a white American star for May 9 on the T-34 tank over our Red Star?”

Anatoly Kucheryavy @ Anatan6, on Twitter, May 1, 2021

“It can be explained: the United States defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War and today’s Russia, including her Putinist form or rather radical deformation, was created and foisted as a result of the complete and unconditional surrender of the Soviet Union the dictates of which the Putin regime strictly observes.

 

Eastern Orthodoxy always wanted to write Orphic on its birth certificate as its proper and true name. But then somehow in the process it chose to put there a doxa¸ opinion, a word related to the Slavic desiti, to find, to encounter, to happen, and even to scare or to get terrified, with the underlying sense of Orthodoxy thus being literally “the very horror” or “the true terror.”

 

Some twenty-seven million Soviets,

twenty-seven million of the beautiful people

fell as sealed and scattered seeds to earth

in the Great Patriotic War with the Beast.

Those were born as one-time Phoenixes

to the timber made of souls, strings, hearts

in the “Orthodox” melodies and songs

I can hear still Orphic romances and dirges,

some of the world’s deepest harmonies

by which the cosmos wanted to array

mankind’s stream and strife and hope.

 

Oh, what then about the beautiful and its very soul?

How did that vanish so soon—after winning

at such a price and sacrifice the greatest of all wars?

Oh, do or ever did such heroic and beautiful souls

have a place where these were mocked and even denied

in the doctrine that cast the human as a concrete cadre,

as a soulless bloc made to suit a petite bureaucratic mind

for which all was matter, discipline, and iron order only?

What did a Khrushchev or a Brezhnev know or care

about things of the spirit, the soul and the beautiful

or about how gone heroes live or die, if uncared, upon their fall?

 

And how a lot more less is there left for a beauty and grace of souls

when everyone who wasn’t sold or bought knows that Putin’s bros

and Putin himself are the country’s and the nation’s assassins

and when the latter himself boasts that, under him, Russia is the first

now in the world for having “absolutely the best prostitutes of all,”

if not in the absolute numbers of ex-KGB oligarch-billionaires

made of the planned destitution and degradation of the nation

and of Russia’s plotted, plodding, cashed-in liquidation

under Vlasov’s flags unfurled amid Nazi wartime ranks?

Where can society’s depraved bottom once with total power

lead the country and the state if not to a hole that ends in Hell?

 

But it is America where Rome’s Capitol was transposed

and where the “Greek system” is deployed at schools

to melt and mold the youth into new bold Dionysians

even if small crosses may still be a sport on their necks.

And it’s the US Republican primary rule that uniquely says

that “man,” as a US citizen, is endowed by God himself

with certain inalienable gifts on which one’s equality

or worth in relation to everyone else is firmly based

and that are neither to be pilfered by the government

nor up to the government whether to be acknowledged.

Thus in each and everyone (a piece of) God is somehow held.

 

After all what else does humans and whole nations set apart

In the end than the ideas they hold dear and cling to for life

and what, in the very end, is man, that human sapiens,

than what he carries and knows to mind in his own mind,

that is, if one starts from the top and looks at humanity

from there, beholding and fast beholden to the principle

of a higher kind instead of sticking one to the butt and base?

Or should mankind rather prefer and promote the mindless

and the soulless instead—straight psycho- and sociopaths,

paths deadly—with a fit of heartless tyranny erotomania?

So the question remains: who wants to live and die and endure

 

by what’s noble, better, higher as opposed to what’s base,

worse, soulless, vile, morbid, murderous, corrupt—?

Deep down in their hearts American think that, between

the US and nowhere (else), a special, divine dispensation

made the former a new Atlantis & a shining city on a hill,

on the last Olympus or Meru, a world’s new holy mountain,

where even the Tree of Knowledge smuggled from the East

became a Big New Apple of which its new winners may now eat.

A place where if you are lucky, you are laid off to fit Fates’

grand plan so that you can keep your respect of which the rest

doesn’t give a damn, while you carve out for yourself a place

 

of a hermit somewhere with a view of the Meru world mountain.

And that happens whenever one is either much too dumb or

way too wise for the system of the government and the market,

free of such souls that differ, without even begging to at all.

This new Rome was built on a premise that all men are equal,

but with one or few of little twists of the legalese that holds

under breath that, in principle, President can be only a Brother

Mason—that is one of those who wrote and designed the whole thing.

Russia wanted to be the new, third or fourth Rome, skipping the US spot,

but with all her counterfeits and miming copies, she never understood

what Rome and its Empire meant and for what or whom they stood,

 

while the US, like the Rome of old, brought in all the other nations’ Gods

as its spoils both of peace and war—under the gorgoneion, asserted aegis

of Goddess Liberty—Libera, the Light-Bearer. Why, isn’t it her personally

on top of the US Capitol beside the French statue in the harbor of New York?.

She’s in fact Proserpina the wife and the abductee of the God of the dead

and otherwise a consort of Dionysus, the God of revelry, mysteries and wine,

who dies many times and never truly, never quite, and whom the schools

honor every week as often as guts, scholarship, funds, and drunkenness allow,

even if in its churches official the old instrument of death and torture remains

still prominent as the highest sacrament and as the only way and only truth.

By the sophists at the helm even the Platonists are asked to praise and defer to

 

to such cliches of the day that can get you high or you can never be a spangled star.

But in Russia that succumbed to the Eros of the West, Putin, a new good despot-gnome,

now demands from the offspring of the victors from 1945 to bend down on the knees

and bow to a base of the base, lows of the lows, and ask like good slaves and sycophants

for a leniency in being herded, fleeced, lied to, conned, duped, betrayed, swindled

mercilessly and with a gusto to the country’s early abyss, scrap heap, plundered tomb.

And like nearly all the rest of culture so today’s music ever since the times of rock ‘n roll

is Dionysian, with the mysteries handed over to the devils, buyers of the trafficked souls,

just as in the name of this old new Dionysus and his obstruse Dame the Cold War was won

over the “dialectic” opponent, the sexless, cold and glacial, dull and murky, woeful bore.

If, like Tartarus in the case of the most grievous souls, the Soviet Union tried to stop

 

its souls from leaving and going up and out of its portentous, forbidding mouth,

the US, like Pluto aka Plutus, Wealth, had been open to all and everything,

a true “All-Receiver,” as the Orphic Hymn to Pluto names the Lord who guards

the “roots of the world” themselves—for everything and all the power is born

of Hades, the earth, and returns to it, as Cicero explains, with the dead he keeps

being Imperium universal and ultimate and supreme wealth. And it is the people,

the people of Meru, this World (Mine or) Mountain that has been built anew

on the premise that if you must believe in something whatever that could be

and once you believe in something, you must stick to it through thick and thin,”

no matter whether it is true or not, no matter even if the Heavens themselves

were to fall and everything else burned down: all you need is to want it above all.

 

And it was back in 2000 in Montreal where one sick and jaded Russian student

lectured us all in the audience that the Russians are now sick and jaded of ideals to death.

And so it passed, just as Giuseppe Mazzini, the Arch Initiate, already proclaimed

in his vision of the Risorgimento: “After the Rome of the emperors and the Rome of the Popes,

there will come the Rome of the people.” And those people were created and fated

to be Americans, while, in Russia, with each year there is less and less Odettes

gathered by the Underworld king or pimp named Rothbart who, in the meantime,

might have emigrated already too to the Promised Land—along with most of the pack.

For most and too many of the Soviet best perished in the war, and the other sorts

were left more intact, and on those the long and deliberate process of betrayal

and gradual dismantlement of that Utopia from above was then shrewdly based,

 

as marvelously or rather too painfully captured in the 1957 Soviet movie,

The Cranes Are Flying (Летят журавли), showing the damage done to the nation’s soul

by the war and much more still by the cowardice of the amoral men who hid behind

and survived at the expense of the Victory and other people’s lives and sacrifice.

At the 1958 Cannes Film Festival this film won the Palme d'Or. And for what?

In the movie the good hero who volunteered to defend his land dies after another

soldier insults the photo of his love he left behind in Moscow, and the trash,

a sly musician, wins and shames the hero’s stranded love after he rapes her.

Soldiers’ dead souls are then cranes passing high above the living below.

The French Liberation approvingly contrasted the raped, abused,

manipulated and cheated-on heroine for her purity and authenticity

 

with Brigitte Bardot, the French “sex bomb” and female prime icon of that time.

And the East German fans wrote an accolade to Tatiana Samoilova, the lead actress:

“Finally we see on the Soviet screen a face, not a mask.”

The killing-off of the spirit, heart, and character

of the Soviet people began—along with the rest.

There the Soviet woman, a widow of a war hero,

was ritually raped by the worst, a traitor, a coward, new

“smart ass,” and thus tumbled, subdued, exposed

and exported to the world—twelve years only

after the 1945 Victory—as there is darkness

with a pounding star, so there’s another one that’s just flat

 

where neither the soul nor any sunshine soul can come through.