tarot and i ching

Tarot reading, the use of random occurrences with assigned meanings as a diagnostic for semi-random causal occurrences maintaining no assigned meaning beyond the signified. So it is not in any means a proper mode of analysis for insight, nor a tool of divination. However, if one is looking for acausal synchronicities in thought or action, tarot may be implemented to further an understanding of irrational events, though the percentage of accuracy is indeterminable until ex post facto, as there is no test or experiment available that could possibly point out a probability of correctness. The same goes for the I Ching, stichomancy, runes, etc.

television love letter

Television, my voluptuous darling. Speaking in the colloquial, in the formal, in melodic advertisement jingle. We organized a religion around you, setting our dinners before your altar and our minds before your judgement. You told us about the sexual frustrations of 20 something generics arguing on MTV. This we noted with lack of awe and taciturn understanding. It is a difficult life getting lavish housing for free in a city you are not from, living with sexy singles who forget to take out the garbage every once in awhile. And yum, you served us tasty sit-coms about average everyday people made extraordinary by their comedic problems. These were sublte revelations for us, illustrating that no matter how funny or terrible life may become, everything perpetually works out in the end, that life is like a swimming pool: you dive in, get wet, and when you get out, everything is the same. And your brave sporting events, those eloquent sermons of the American spirit, outlining the nature of the free market: you compete, try your best, bring your A game everyday, and you too can own shiny, worthless, golden things. Sometimes you tear your ligaments or pull a hamstring, but who said capitalism was without its injuries. Those courageous players, still playing children games, and accumulating wealth because of it. Also, television my darling, your product recommendations are excellent advice for living a practical life. My new SUV makes me forget about the debt I incurred to own it when i am crumpling shopping carts with my front fender in parking lots, and the anti-depressant recommended by that doctor with the liquor smooth voice only very occasionally gives me diarreha and suicidal thoughts. 8 out of 10 of us agree, TV, that your news broadcasts are informative: they tell us what cities murders happen in, thus keeping property values down, which is a boon to my slum-lord friends who own pink con-apt complexes in Watts. When they get letters complaining about ruptured water mains, because of you TV they respond by saying there was a rape across the corner. But we are not always reverant or idle. When you talk about the social lifes of rich celebrities, we feel like we are participating in something greater than ourselves with you as our peer, kind television, mediating the information in a manner that even my nephew who has cerebral palsy can join in on the fun. We also love your music, which we hear in the shopping mall, and it comforts us and reminds us of you. Oh picture-sound, oh sweet love noise, oh mini-series mavin, oh my sweet date to movies edited for basic cable. To you I raise the golden pears of my mind in tribute, to you I rush home in a frenzy, not pausing to take off my coat when I curl up before you, adoration gleaming in my eyes and expectation fulminous in my breast. Your Carls Jr. commercials are beyond compare, and I am not even hungry. Always there, transmitting away the very best you have to offer, never running out of things to say, breathing over me when I fall asleep drunk on the couch like a sweet parent, humming the songs of weed whackers and tampons, translating my desires from the human to the specific material of the language of things. TV, may you watch over my life with sapphire light and euphonic sound, protect me from my boredom, and never let me accept limits for what i can and can't own, Amen.

poets and murderers

America supports its murderers better than it does its poets. Murders get a room, sustinence, a gym, a prison rec room, and occasional interviews with the press after the dramatic simulacra of justice known as the trial. Rapists are given more creedence in the courtroom with their testimonies than an essayist is given in a journal. I wonder what the proportion of criminals to writers is in this country. It would only surprise me if there happened to be more writers. This country could easily support poets for their lifetimes with the finances being fed into federal and state prisons. But it seems that criminals serve more of a purpose than poets. Criminals enforce the average citizen's legal morality by providing examples of deviance. Poets are tied to life, not morality. They enforce no conventions in the populace, except making life worth living through the gifts of articulate communication. And the country obviously hates them for it. There are multitudes of television programs that portray criminals and their violent acts, but not a single one that concerns the acts of the poet. This is a message to Americans, one that says it is more glamorous to kill somebody than it is to write a love sonnet to a woman. It says that investigating a crime scene is more important than investigating a piece of creative writing or a novel. Crimes are usually the work of no more than a few hours, while work on a book takes years. People often hear of a shocking crime in the headlines and respond with "But how could anybody do that?" I read Susan Sontag, Dostoyevsky, Knut Hamsun, etc and think the same thing, only with an appreciative wonder instead of a harrowing disgust. Murderers and rapists do not deserve the attention lavished upon them by the media. Give back the limelight to the innovative filmmakers, artists, and writers of our generation. Do not fetishize the sickness of individuals through mainstream movies, news, and magazines. This is serious.

response to my writing

"I do not know what to do with this. Pick any point on the compass...in that direction madness lies. "

Ah, how illuminating. Truely, what did i expect? Praise? Congradulations? I mean, it is obvious that i am seperated from most of the writing community, if you could call the smattering of published and unpublished writers across the nation that. It first came to me during my brief and disasterous internship for Pacific University's MFA in Writing program over a few too many glasses of wine. Writers defending warfare, writers defending corporations. A compendium of conservatives, writing cute little slice of life poems and essays detailing the minutae of installing toilets amid incense. Then a fictional story about fighting the Taliban and Al Queda, glossed with Republican justifications for aggressive occupation and civilian casualties. Pretty blatent pandering to establishment vanities in the hopes of recognition.

Another problem, the adherence of writers to the strict history of the art. I mean, it is fine to admire the writing tradition, but to expect people to adopt the structure of Tennyson? Of Whitman? Well, as Vonnegut's artist friend said "There are generally two types of artists, those who respond to the history of their art and those who respond to life itself." Perhaps i should be writing a Victorean novel to illustrate how ridiculous adherance to tradition for the sake of tradition is. Even following contemporary styles is a dead end. Who wants to read writing journals stuffed with tepid journalism masquerading as poorly researched sociology, in the classical form of the short story? "He left her after she had the abortion. She cried out his name into a telephone that was off the hook. 'John, John, I'm sorry." Bleh. Life is all there is. Communicate with it. Do not speak to the dead or for the dead. They left what marks they could in the atmosphere of their times. Deconstructing Holocaust literature should be a crime. Let us remember to sing our own songs, to intimate our own musics, to abscond from criticism if we do not create.

mercurial bore

Self expression is a joke. Nobody writes about their genitals. They conceal them like freedoms in swaths of aesthetics, spinning artificial beauties like intoxicated conversations across the gleam of their nudity, following the sentiments of Christian empire and sublimated dialectics. We get tired life; a printing press reproducing the works of reality's printing press. "Today i walked along the shoreline and the luster of purple painted mountains behind awed me with the thought of God's benevolence, that there is beauty in Christ the lord as there is love." We have fashioned nature into our most noble sentiments and replaced our active imaginations with conceptions of God or spirituality. But we have not incorporated nature in its totality. No one would admit to acting goatish, or to having the qualities of a white-fluked squid. Rather we mirror our emotions after sunsets and flowers, we tell ourselves through way of others in conversations that art and science are the human achievements, not politics or warfare. Each of us creates his own propaganda and admires it in genuflection; we forget the arabesque of flows and ebbs, the consequence of the stars upon the eyes, and the meaning of the aphids that spot the rosebush. The truth is that i don't write about genitals either. But this woman does.

Singing Earth Publishing - Gaia Singer