Month: July 2020

Go irenically among the restless legged
yearning to sleep free
of a dogged journey westward
unable to stop
at any next nearer shore
but insist on diving
and kicking beyond the surf
through doldrums
through rogue waves
tsunamis and cyclones

go irenically among the restless minded
yearning to sleep free
of every wind that blows
through unprotected dreams
rising when consciousness thins
but insist on finding
and extrapolating beyond tomorrow
adding factors
adding algorithms
possibilities and disasters

go irenically among the restless
yearning to sleep free
kneed jerks come anxieties rise
in good season and ill
one quiet breath then two
solves nothing great or small
in this or any season
desiring is desiring
tendencies are tendencies
blessed be and amen

Carrie Newcomer: You Can Do This Hard Thing

given: without counting one-by-one
find out how many pears there are
if there are three groups of pears
with 14 pears in one group
26 in another group
and 49 in the final group
write the numbers of each group
lined up over each other
and draw a line under them

add the numbers of the right column
write down the resulting farthest right digit
below the line
if there is a number left
write it above the next column to the left

add to any number you carried over
from the right column
the remaining numbers in this column
write the result
to the left of the last number
of the right column

hooray pears added
you can do this hard thing
and then we’ll un-add
until you can do that hard thing

and then we’ll speed-add
yes you can do that hard thing
as well as speed-un-add

then it will be your turn
to take this as far as you can
and it will be your turn
to teach me more than maths logic
O show me the world
through another’s eye
I want to do this hard thing
and to do it with you

“So much winning,” is a mantra of an id-driven top-dog. Were they alone in their ravening, it would be sad. As they merely express the desire of every desirer, it is maddening.

There is no antidote and so I write not of a mafioso don, but as one tempted by every breath to store up nine more against an unimaginable time when each breath comes faster and briefer, using up the largest of reserves.

“So much winning,” hooks the fantasies of every lottery play, ladder climber, underling, and outcast—not to mention every middler and reasonably well-off.

What keeps getting missed by “winning” is that its very intent is sabotaged by its premise that winning is self-sustaining—a perpetual boot-strap pulling. Winning cannot continue to claim a central spot in a raison d’être, for it carries an even larger limit of some equal but opposite loss. I cannot win as much if you are also winning some.

This limit means that “so much winning” is false advertising when applied to any group of people or even a whole economy. “Winning” is a corporate lie, for it doesn’t even work in a work-a-day world of an individual. Every advancement requires each previous stage of growth as the ground from which it can spring.

Winning means nothing without a background of loss. A background of loss is a constant threat to a win. The more the drive to win, the larger grows a resistance.

If we are not caught in the machinations of someone else’s yearning for a win, we can’t seem to get out of our own way. How maddening that winning, as a cover of whining, goes on and on. After all these generations, we are back to the beginnings of stories about beginnings without a clue of how to write a story without a motif of winning running through it.

One hint, maybe, is to translate “winning” as “violence.” I expect that seeing something as it is will help. And you?