Nate Capehart's poetry and prose outlet; CUTBACKCULDESAC

A reblog/rerun::

Time is not a line, but a network of intentionalities.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Intentionality is not only being conscious of something but being conscious of something as something, where the ‘as’ is hermeneutical, constrained by contents stored on the backstage of intentionality.
Shaun Gallagher, "The Inordinance of Time"

A perception, as sudden as blinking, that subject and object are one, will lead to a deeply mysterious wordless understanding; . . .
Huang Po/



Panorama: Pea size (don’t divide it)

Mars here; Betelgeuse there;

A memory of a close rockface and a feeling of exposure;

dropped into a living forest of now;

a taste of whiskey in the landscape.

We have been here before

at the pawnshop at the corner of space and time where

trees form a canopy near a green field for running through

and we trade I for now,

(don’t divide it with words)

and rain falls gently raising mildly scented dust

in the mindscape as time

flows through the mountain meadow, a gentle stream,

not noticed unless late for some moneyed appointment


or war;

dividing,

trading now for " I."

I would like to thank the
central committee
for allowing me.

I come before you
Without a title
Having none,
I can only claim what this
Is.
This subject
Objectifying itself.

Do not keep me alien-
Outside,
Allow me to be the bird;
The flying flower.
To dissolve into
Contingency and
Stop being other.

I wish the central committee had
Better eyesight so
They might notice when
We cry.

The world is archived
In a tiny globe
made up of tiny crystals
If you wish to retrieve it
you must join it
and know your password.

Waiting in Denny's for the...

 

Waiting in Denny's for the Poetry Reading at the Library in Escondido , 1976

 (Readings by Steve Kowit and Carolyn Forche)

 

Like Godot and Godiva by the gates of hell or at least near the

                        nether world;

            Scratch your ass or go nude on a horse thru town or

                        write a poem;   all equal acts.

            Here in this tavern, this carnival, I eat carne asada

                        and wait for the poetry reading.

            All-American cheerleader waitresses, over-made, slowly

                        see to the needs of obese customers.  Over-made and, except

            for an impossible butterfly I once saw

 in the jungle, they  would seem ridiculous and not natural.

                     

                        How did I get a ticket to this gluttonous Santa Claus     

clown explosion; a mixture of usurism and greed with

goodness and fond memories and giving, with saints and 

                        polished shysters and redneck beasts of good intent? 

The wait on the time coordinates and my cultural agreement

 about words become less important when       

            a rough beast in a clerical collar slouches up to me and says, "I'm          

goin'  uhn, huh,

tu be born, uhn, uh,

again,” and laughs, “huh, huh, huh."

 

 

 

Nate Capehart - Monday, May 17, 2010 9:09:03 AM

 

          Danny is our son, Daniel Frederick Drollinger, who died of Melanoma in July 1998.

 

TYING MY SHOELACES IN THE BALD SPOT

For Danny Boy

 

One who died is only a little ahead of procession, all moving that way. When we round the corner we’ll see him again. We have only lost him for a moment because we fell behind, stopping to tie a shoe-lace.  J. M. Barrie

 

I can’t imagine where you were;

  lying seemingly unconscious; melanoma in your spine.

 

Maybe you were in those many photos we have:

            Fishing, sun-burnt, beer in hand.

            On Diamondhead where you jogged on summer days.

            Jokingly putting your head on the beheading stone in Kole Kole pass

            Mimicking ‘American Gothic’ beside your mother in your yard on Hilyard with a fishing pole instead of a pitchfork.

 

We wish we had photos of you:

            Surfing/sliding down greased stairs on cardboard at college parties.

            Walking on hot coals at a barbecue.     

            Twelve years old, at a barbershop showing how you wanted your hair like Tom Petty on an album cover.

            Playing Bass Drum in the high school band at the Rose Parade and at a football  halftime competition playing ‘The 1812 Overture.’

 

You might be still selling plastic tubes fastened to flashlights in the parking lot where Star wars was playing.

 

I’ll bet in a strange twist of cosmic time you were and are drumming in a band named “Liquid Chicken” for pizza and beer like you did in college.

 

Maybe forever at  the many restaurants we ate at, savoring life, when we knew you were going to die within weeks. Two weeks before you died Ibrahim the owner of one bargained with you so that you got a better wine for the same price (a Hanzell Pinot Noir) and then he cooked medallions of beef at our table.

 

Your signature and you are in the medical software which you helped develop.

You chided another employee for gossiping.

The company had to request that you change the way you had constructed your ‘Dilbert’ cubicle.

 

I think and hope you are not still in the Iowa cornfields where you wandered all night after your sister, Buffy, died of an asthma attack, leaving four  children whom you wanted to help raise.

 

I like to think you are in the grove at the end of Hilyard street near where you lived and died. I saw a young man there only yesterday from a distance who looked like you, waving.

You introduced me to ‘Tom Petty,’ (I won’t back down) ‘Blue Oyster Cult,’ (“[Don’t Fear] The Reaper” and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”)  ‘Tom Waites,’ (“A Soldier’s Medals”) ‘The Alan Parsons Project,’(somewhere in the mist of time when the wind will blow right through us tell them you were a friend of mine) ‘The Pogues,’ and ‘Beck.’

 

You invented a game; board and all, like Clue, Dungeons and Dragons, war games, and Lord of the Rings. Instead of rooms there were places in the forest. One was the Bald Spot where the extra terrestrials landed in the movie ET.

 

I can’t imagine where you were.

I can’t imagine where you were when I told you that although you were a stepson, you were my son and how well I thought you had done in life.

We weren’t sure you were conscious until tears streamed down your face a few minutes before you died.

 

Maybe you were at the bald spot, waiting. Maybe you still are at the bald spot in the grove at the south end of Hilyard with that  machine which calls your loved ones back and causes your heart to show red, beating hard;

 

            leaving.   

 

       Wait!

 

  Wait a few of those cosmic ET seconds while I tie this poetry together.

 

 

Singing Beyond the Boundaries For...

 

Buffy is our daughter, Bethany Drollinger Jetty, who died of an asthma attack in 1996

 

Singing Beyond the Boundaries

For Buffy

 

"So it is not after all for him, as it is for the thought of the thing, for myself, and for us all, that I feel sad. That he should be cut down at the very opening of his career, and when he had so much reason to anticipate a prosperous course. Seems almost against the order of nature. For him I have no doubt, the change is not a sad one. I do not think for a moment that it is not infinitely better for him, and that having once passed the great boundary he had no wish to be here again."          Quote of  Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain  (Colonel 20^th Maine, Medal of Honor recipient for calling a bayonet charge with few men and little ammunition left which saved the Union left flank on the 2^nd day of the battle of Gettysburg, General, and governor of Maine) on the death of one of his young officers.

 

            Recent scientific experiments show that elephants sing.

            It can be heard for miles, but is so low humans cannot hear it.

 

            When I was  kid in the 1950s there was an

elephant at the Camden Park Zoo, an old, insane,

bleary and wild eyed formerly wild creature, chained -

fenced, it could go nowhere; not even three feet.

 

It swayed, crazily, constantly back and forth like a horse

with a broken leg I saw once, in evident pain.

 

I have this elephant in my

 

chest - -heavy, pained, shackled, uncommunicant.

 

A deep breath does not make it go away.

 

 

She had a strong clear voice like Nancy Wilson, the lead singer in Heart (“Will You be there in the Morning”), and Enya (“How Can I Keep from Singing”), and Grace Slick (“White Rabbit”), and Stevie Nicks in Fleetwood Mac (“The Landslide Took Me Down”) combined.

 

She stoked herself up on prednisone and over-used her inhaler to sing karaoke.

 

Maybe the poverty and four kids made her still smoke.

 

I have an elephant in my chest because of her sidelong pickerel smile

 

I have an elephant in my chest because she was delighted that I bought her and Jenny shoes.  One red stripe and one black checks for their left feet and one black stripes and one red checks for their right feet.

 

I have an elephant in my chest because when I walk through a food store and see a large cheap jar of grape jam I know she has looked at it before me and bought it for her children.

 

I have an elephant in my chest because as a girl and a woman she had fewer choices than men.

 

I have an elephant in my chest because while she was pregnant with her first child she worked at a fast food for minimum wage and when she forgot her uniform hat we wouldn't bring it.

 

I have an elephant in my chest because she knew how I got frustrated hanging Christmas tree lights (although I delighted in the tree afterwards) and sewed for me an ornament with needlepoint that read "Hang your own fucking lights."

 

I have an elephant in my chest because she painted a picture of a fist coming out of a cloud with the middle finger sticking up at the world.

 

I have an elephant in my chest because she tried to work but the money was all taken by child care.

 

I have an elephant in my chest because she had welfare cards from four states.

 

I have an elephant in my chest.

 

I am coaxing it to sing.

 

Maybe it is singing and I have

 

difficulty hearing it.

 

 

 

 

 

Abstract Territory; Stages of...

 

Abstract Territory ; Stages of Operation

Austere wind of chopper-blades.

The tragic dumb-show began.

They knew the steps,

camouflage  faced mimes,

in single file,

hand signals like dance movements,

for silence,

down the chorus line

into a backdrop of deep jungle.

 

The climax, when the point

heard a metallic snick,

his cue,

just before the explosive curtain,

to bow off the trail.

 

 

Nate Capehart - Friday, March 19, 2010 1:50:27 PM

 

 

Img001

A facebook exchange with John Clemmer:

 

-My comment on the FB group “finding 1 million people who believed in evolution.” Which started this exchange.

 

There are many more than that, if you can get them to chime in. I am naive enough to imagine that someone could not know that things, all things, evolve. The facts are there and it is a matter of belief to not accept them as an extremely factual truth.

 

John:  

There has never been a beginning, there will never be an end. Existence has always existed. Evolution/Creationism is a mute point. Contemplate eternity and infinity.

 

Correction....are mute points.

 

Nate Capehart:

My spiritual self likes that; but during that existence it is impossible that things don't evolve. Otherwise there would be no time. (although Kurt Goedel theorized that there was no time either)

 

I answered someone on the site about this as follows: It's factual!!! If the table in front of you is a table then evolution also is evolution-- it exists as much as the table exists. Bones in rock strata from millions of years ago are there just like the table.

 

I am wearing a peice of amber on a chain that has a mosquito looking bug in it from 30 million years ago.

 

So, you don't need to beleive in evolution. It is a fact and is better than any fact that is doesn't happen.

 

But then if you want to get spiritual my Buddhist self knows nothing exists.

 

John:  

Right, it's all illusion. Believing in anything, is just a belief. Knowing goes beyond belief. Like I know rocks are hard and water's wet, usually.....

 

Nate, I just noticed your profile image, exquisite. Now that's something real, beauty!!

 

I agree with the time thing. If one believes in time, then one must believe in evolution. It's completely logical. Creationism, in my humble opinion, is a fairy tail.

 

Nate Capehart:

Thanks, Rosanna took it as we started to hike back from the NW point of Oahu. I've always thought it was magical. I commented on it when I posted it last week: My new profile photo was taken on the northwest shore of Oahu. We were hiking back from the point. That's Danny, our son who died of melanoma in 1998, ahead of me in the rainbow mist.

 

John:

It is magical. Moments like that are a very rare capture.

 

Nate Capehart:

Hey John, good conversation. I am going to put most of that exchange on my vox blog. The FB group on evolution seems to have set me off. For some reason it bothers me that people can't see the difference between fact and belief. I'll just have to get over it!!!

 

 

 

Time Stretched Intention Contours the...

 

  Time Stretched Intention Contours the Hermeneutical Landscape/

 

Time is not a line, but a network of intentionalities.

                                                                    Maurice Merleau-Ponty/

 

Intentionality is not only being conscious of something but being conscious of something as something, where the ‘as’ is hermeneutical, constrained by contents stored on the backstage of intentionality.

                                                                                   Shaun Gallagher, The Inordinance of Time/

 

A perception, as sudden as blinking, that subject and object are one, will lead to a deeply mysterious wordless understanding; . . .

                                                     Huang Po/

 

Panorama: Pea size  (don’t divide it)/ 

 

Mars here; Betelgeuse there;  /

 

A memory of a close rockface and a feeling of exposure;  /

 

dropped into a living forest of now;  /

 

a taste of whiskey in the landscape.  /

 

We have been here before   /

at the pawnshop at the corner of space and time where    /

 

trees form a canopy near a green field for running through   /

 

and we trade I for now,    /

(don’t divide it with words)   /

 

and rain falls gently raising mildly scented dust   /

 

in the mindscape as time   /

 

flows through the mountain meadow, a gentle stream,   /

 

not noticed unless late for some moneyed appointment   /

 

or war;     /

 

dividing,     /

 

trading now for I.

 

 

Nate Capehart - Sunday, December 27, 2009 5:01:22 PM

 

25

 

He would not join

the contest

for the most humble

and so, won.

He immediately

hid his face in shame.

 

27

 

The full moon effects the tides

in our brains.

 

28

 

We are each a group of

vibrations/electrons

that have become ego protrusions

in the great vibrate.

 

 

Humans as ego protrusions

are anchor points in the chaos of the

levels of vibration in

all dimensions.

 

30

 

Only situated, contingent reality

can be meaningful

to languagized, culturized, linear thinkers.