"The Empire Never Ended." - Philip K. Dick

Here’s how it all works: You take one all-powerful hegemony (Rome, Britain, Spain, the USA, et al); That hegemony encroaches upon the territory of independent nations, or the vestiges of dying empires (Palestine, India, South America, Indonesia, et al) and makes sure that the local authority (Herod, the Raj, Montezuma, the nearest dictator, et al) is friendly to the Empire and amenable to its designs in the independent nation. If the local authority turns out to be entirely amenable to Rome, Herod is kept in power either as a figurehead, or at best, as a coercive middlemen who can aid Rome in controlling the local populace. If it turns out that Herod is of little use to Rome, the Empire simply sets up its own local authority (prefect, directorate, bureau, soviet, agency, et al) and rules things directly.

Next, the empire goes about enslaving, outright or virtually, ninety percent of the local population (the peasants, the Indians, the fellahin, the natives, et al) by claiming that the land that they had heretofore occupied belongs to the ten percent of the nation deeming itself the actual and real nation. In other words, a real Palestinian, Indian, Indonesian becomes one of the (armed) minority who benefit from the occupation by policing the (unarmed) majority. The unarmed minority are little more than citizens in name alone. It is they who mine the mines and farm the farms to come up with the local natural resources which are brought to the local factories to produce goods to be exported to the empire. The land which used to belong to the community as a common ground for planting and harvesting is forcibly appropriated by the local armed authority, which deems itself the legitimate owners of the land, and those who actually work it and live upon it are regarded as tenants who must pay for their continued use of it. They pay for it by working either on it to drain the earth of natural resources, or by working in the factories to produce the goods to send back to the empire, which profits from it.

Virginity

Virginity. To an American, the concept seems so outmoded, so outdated. How might we understand those ancient patristic texts which speak of virginity as the ultimate virtue?
Who but an American can understand better? Is not our culture the very bastion of the cult of the new - nay, the brand new. Think of your last purchase. The product within still lay unused. Untouched. In short, virgin.
Maybe this is Richard Branson's trade secret. Not to mention that of "Madonna." For who, among us, does not crave the virgin; which is to say, the brand new?

Epitaph

Some men were born to breed and fight,
But I was made to read and write.

Syzygos' top 10 lists

Top 10 best-loved texts (or, paper-bound locations of his most preferred thoughts-as-text):

1. The Western Way of Love, by Denis de Rougement
2. Cutting through Spiritual Materialism, by Chunyung Trungpa
3. Meditations on the Tarot, by Anonymous (Valentin Tomberg)
4. Shakespeare (Complete Works)
5. Living Time, by Maurice Nicoll
6. The Outsider, by Colin Wilson
7. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
8. Philosophy as a Way of Life, by Pierre Hadot
9. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, by Henry Miller
10. The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Top 10 musical compositions and/or composers(or audio recordings of his most preferred emotions-as-sound):

1. Mostly anything that was composed in Western Europe before music began to degrade in the 18th century. The earlier, the better.
2. Nearly all Indian classical music
3. Nearly all Chinese classical music
4. Dead Can Dance
5. Stephen Micus
6. Nearly all Byzantine or Russian Chant
7. 10,000 Maniacs (with Natalie Merchant)
8. Kate Bush (especially “The Hounds of Love”)
9. Pink Floyd
10. The music of De Hartmann and Gurdjieff


Top 10 films of all time, followed by director(or moving pictures that best capture the ineffable quality of the deepestaspects of his life):

1. Nostalgia (Andrei Tarkovsky)
2. Andrei Rublev (also Tarkvovsky)
3. Wings of Desire (Wim Wender)
4. Apocalypse Now (F.F. Coppola)
5. All the Mornings of the World (Alain Corneau)
6. Aguerre: the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog)
7. Russian Ark
8. Into the Wild (Sean Penn)
9. Kolya (Jan Sverak)
10. The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Peter Jackson)


Top 10 dichotomies that best encapsulate his most obsessive thinking:

1. ineffable / prosaic
2. transcendent / immanent
3. teleological / immediate
4. tradition / modernism
5. secular / sacred
6. Europe / America … but sometimes Europe / Russia
7. Logos / Mythos
8. attention and memory as constitutive of Being / forgetting asnon-being
9. Essence / existence
10. pesto / marinara

Three Wishes

I wish that I were you,
I wish that you were me,
And in my being you,
And in you being me,
I wish that we both could see.

Last Father's Day

I know who that is.
It is not my father.

Not the one who
Partially raised me
By the scruff of my neck,
Feeding me with Snickers and Banana
Dreams,

Swooning to Brahms and Mahler
In the sweltering Southland night
(the only classical broadcast in
“LA-LA land“)

Calling my hand, or
Beating the heck out of me
In just about every blessed game
You can imagine
(save chess).

Not this
Stammering bald eagle - beak flecked
With foam and screeching
About the illegal invasion of aliens,
And the hegemony of the liberals in his overheated,
Underrated imagination.

Not the Vietnam Navy vet
And USS Constellation seaman
Promising to spit
In L.B.J.‘s snout
If the bastard ever came
Aboard,

Though one deceptively like him.

Not my dad, of course,
But a superb imago,
A sixty-two year old ditto
Reproducing one
Who used to

weep

Upon seeing overcrowded
Cattle trucks
Rattling down Route
Sixty-six.

I imagine
I remember this face,
But I somehow just can’t place the name.

Glory to the Rainbow and the Whiteness in Light!

The essence of Whiteness is light and space
Filled with all colors of beauty and grace.
The aim of our whiteness: our race to efface,
Making our case when your race we embrace.