ST. GEORGE slaying the Dragon, facade of the great Munster Cathedral,
beautiful geomantic center of Basel, Switzerland [click photo for next . . . ]

ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON—subjugating
the Earth by force

This is an image to ponder, to meditate upon. The metaphysics of
violent use force as means to power and control has been around
in Western culture for at least three thousand years. This era of coming
to order by force is now rapidly collapsing around us, everywhere
we look, not just on the political stage with corruption and unnecessary
wars, or in our incredibly troubled and disharmonious relationship
with the Earth, but also and perhaps more insidiously, in the cultural
artifacts we create and "consume" every day.

What we need to watch out for and act swiftly to resolve, I think,
is contradiction. I've said over and over again that Nature knows
no contradiction, no conflict, no waste. All three of these last terms
needs some clarification, which I can't go into here, because I'm
using them in a consciously new way, but I'd rather focus on waste
now, as a means of setting the stage for the Neon Graffiti piece below.

We all know what waste is, right? The stuff we don't want, want to
get rid of. Well, waste in far and away its most extreme form has
only been around since 1945 on that fateful day--July the 16th at
5:30 in morning, when the so-call TRINITY TEST of the first
plutonium bomb, to the surprise of Oppenheimer, Gen. Graves,
and many of the other scientists assembled, actually worked.

We are still living with the terror unleashed upon the world at that
instant. The d & d neon graffiti poem below focuses in a musical,
tragic-comic way on just two aspects of this insanity: the appalling
disingenuous and deceitful use of language which to this day
thoroughly saturates our reporting and thinking on the subject
of all things nuclear, wether bombs or energy (In my view Poetry
and Philosophy have the task of both proposing the new, and
deconstructing and getting rid of the old and useless, too); and
the waste, what the Danish director Michael Madson, the maker
of the recent documentary, INTO ETERNITY, brilliantly describes
as "the fire which cannot be put out." That is exactly right. The
fire which cannot be put out. Well, to end here with a personal note,
I now find myself working in one of the most rugged and wild
wilderness areas in the world, which, as I read and explore the
area on bike and foot, is completely surrounded by the contaminated,
the most deadly toxic, the most still unresolved so-called
"superfund sites"—I refuse to use this trash language—in the
western hemisphere. Where I strongly disagree with Madson,
however, is that nuclear science is most certainly not science
in its most advanced form. It is science that has quite simply
taken us down a profoundly wrong path. The first step of ending
conflict and contradiction and waste is always the hardest.
Simply to stop, and become aware of what we've done.

That's what d & d is about.

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d & d—a neon graffiti poem

unenDangered

spEcies of

deadly substances laCe

wOmb of earth,

conNecting

wiTh nothing other than more of themselves,

lAunching

Multiple waves of

indetermInate effects,

resoNating

in wAys so appallingly contorted in their

insoluble complicaTedness,

that I, as

one amOng countless millions of other members of creatura

wish we would have Not produced in the first place,

&,

given the fact that i myself, too, Do need, as you, perhaps, too,

and many others, also, do need morE than a modicum

of purifiCation and cleansing,

why on earth does the wOrld not put its foot down and simply insist that

we stop thinking up ever-more new deadly Materials

which I'm sure, too, nobody

really wants or needS,

at leaSt

until It (science)

effectively has the Old profound mistakes of the past

thoroughly Neutralized, and, well: the urgency

  of all thIs should by now be obvious -- it is after all rather boring -- in that

the world which seeks security in N-weapons -- (¿contradiction?) -- might soon

need more than than just more Decontamination & DecommissioninG.

(read as if in one breath)

| download mp3 d & d [3.7 Mb]
The musics played in the recording are my
Regulus Regulus ("The Little King), for piccolo solo, and the heart and center of the great Edgar Varése's IONISATION, both availabble at iTunes & Amazon |

Featured IMAGE gallery, mountain water . . . .

If you're a picture-poems fan, please visit my Living Water Gallery—some of
the best of my flowform photography w/ a selection of the highest quality
prints & frames . . . [ mouse over for controls / lower right fro full-screen ]

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All Photographs & texts by Cliff Crego © 2011 picture-poems.com
(created: X.26.2011)