Lovelife entries Lovelife entries Solus Impress 2014 First Edition ©1963 Second Edition ©1975 Third Edition Virge MacLeod, ©1996 Fourth Edition Virge MacLeod, ©2014 Printed in Canada I The Power Trip 3 II Some Vital Craft 169 III Trust in Nothing 227 IV Good Clean Fun? 289 V Simple Crossword 389 VI Wild About What Is 447 VII Just Start on the Round Trip 465 Of power sing, muse, of power unspeakable in the powerless; of perfect art in artlessness; of selfless love within oneself and purity within disease; of truth in mystery, wisdom in innocence, im- mortality in life. Still, one there is beyond these paradoxes, damning and at last outfoxing everyone though not negating; simple understanding but not easy; no thing, to which we owe everything. In lowly emulation of the spendthrift sun’s largess give I to all that want to grow up; yet, no less austere, glare down on, scorch, and cauterize all that, seeking comfort, cannot go without. Cre- ator spirit, creature of some unimaginable nonexistent future, come, welcome who enters, who, shooting the works, cries “Fire away, give it your best shot”— 1 2 I The Power Trip 3 4 Know not nor strive: One sprouts, alive; But know one’s stopped: One’s good as lopped. _ 1__ Never a fell godsend, Christ brings not medicamental “Peace” but homemade pruning shears, bearing no cross of bitterness but trees of sweetness. Grace be with one. __2__ In the prebeginning, well before God, is the healthful wordless. Got the mes- sage? While eternity had no beginning, it is always doing so: unborn at the outset, deathless now. Indomitable earth is newborn here in all its heavenly heaviness under a potent sun brimming the void. And man, an animal, awak- ening to time, unquiet-hearted, breaks the silence, saying, “Let there be elec- tric light”: and by some miracle there is electric light. And he sees the electric light, and well pleased is he; all his sexy electronic plug-ins furnish him the fond illusion he holds power. And he calls his brand of moonlight Day, while needless darkness he calls Night. And after break of day there’s morning, morning morning, no more Night, though dreading darkness man be blind, sensing the menace sans the velvet of the great jet panther’s paw descending. And the gnawer sounds off, “I shall make God in my own incomparable image: let Him have dominion over all the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and the fish of the sea—so that self-righteously I can usurp dominion over all.” And we create God in our own crazed overweening images, thus we destroy Him, in the image of our selves create we Him, for we are blind to what has formed us and to what deforms us. We say, “We can see abundant savory herbage and most fragrant fruit- age growing in this garden; no doubt just for us and ours alone, not for all anthropoids, these blessings have been given as both medicine and food. But nay, may God be damned! our serpentine selves lead us out of cruel need to kill—hence we shall follow, emulating wild dogs,∗ mutilating vulnerable lambs, * Seizing the dread power of their deadly adversaries, lions, leopards, and hyenas, casting off the role as easy prey in favor of that as chief predators, premen were led by observation, by their wits, to grow more truly dangerous and ultimately “human.” 5 no relatives of ours, whose flesh and blood, at all costs, for our boundless profit, we’ll consume!” And as it was, so is the Faustian bargain struck, bring- ing to mind the untold quiet times beside kind winter fires brewing broils, holding the furry night at bay. The hearth gave birth to talk and thought and all the social ironies. By utilizing their most mortal enemy migrating hunters (or their cunning helpmates) improvised the igloo, without which no arctic settlement could have occurred. Ice sharpened up the soul that first took fire; the origin of fire-making lay most likely in the sex act and the flame of passion it produced: the soft wood with a snug hole was called woman, while the hard stick rubbed and twisted got called man. Strangest of creatures, he’s a mecha- nism with a large screw loose. However needful, did not plant foods play a mainly supplemental role in Homo evolution, corpse consumption being the crucial key? Men’s partiality for meat may have grown not from thirst for gore but out of bloodlust, to maintain their tools distended by rich fluids; semen’s rapid re-production was the prime aim, not brains’ swollen overnourishment, the latter proving but an incidental accidental bonus?* If so, what a shame that man obtained his higher functions only by disordering his lower. All the dangers long-appealing constant sex and power pose have sprung from calls for customary butchery?† Were deadly weapons, not just working tools, what helped make sure we ended us? Without stone flakes a frugivore’s teeth never could have penetrated big game’s hides and bones, in turn permitting dietary revolution and thus brain magnification. For good and/or ill manos gave rise to man and to his standard manos a manos: humanoids’ unique manipulative skills, via their crafty hands, took unkown leisured generations to develop out of harmless playing into hurtful tasks, the burgeoning cerebra merely following along? * Thus the fertile human brain, with all its protean potential, was an evolutionary afterthought, developing as wasteful spawn of concentrated protein residue, a kind of ethologic cancer? The enlargening encephalon and “high”-grade diet fed on one another. Who can tell how primitive the interplay—and incompatibility—between our brains and genitals? Did the swellheaded mind not mushroom like an A-bomb from the impulse to screw others? † Our round-the-year sex activity, with its concomitant allaying of ferocity, suggests our species had a bonobolike ancestry. The bonobos’ prolonged survival probably depended on a localized availability of easy sustenance, fostering matriarchy; else, as in common chimps the domineering males would have produced a species of gang predators, exactly what we have in recent homo “sapiens.” Thus how could meat consumption fail to lead at least to such ubiquitous lethal behavior? 6 Lacking excessive uric acid in their bloodstreams over ages men could hardly have grown such compulsively implacable aggressors, such mad nomads. Hunting* carved our rawest spirits, orchestrated human nature and not just its spear side. Damningly ’twas Cain, not Abel, manged to become our story- book engenderer: is murder not encoded in the human psyche? Males seem everywhere to be keen to kill other males. The pitiless savannah predisposed men not to flee but to attack in order to survive; they learned to emulate the lionesses, not the wildebeest.† As soon as they discovered fire-hardened spears their opportunity to kill at more than arm’s length made whatever inhibitions they’d had against slaughtering prove insufficent to stop lethal strife and can- nibalism running rampant; thus from its emergence the now “ruling” species ran the risk of self-extinguishment. How very fit that weaponry, which made us possible, at last makes us expendable. Each slayer acts out in “self-interest,” not as a hapless victim of a lunatic society. Success of sapiens rose out of geno- cide, extermination of erectus?‡ How can we ignore the fact that wild chimps are incorrigibly sexist, xenophobic,§ murderous? Must our coincident if dis- tant ancestors have been the rudimental culprits? Nonetheless the hominids have stood alone since they alone have stood. Hence dropping out of a shared forest domicile were ambidextrous preman and prewoman, driven into domi- neering tribes, first liberated from a simple life of earnest play, and grounded, right-winged, in an urbanized seclusion by the froward madness of frivolous labor are at last enslaved. And now, forever haunted by the lost Elysium, that arboreal dreamtime rooting all religion, an imaginary mammate womblike Golden Age when certainty and bliss, not doubt and terror, reigned throughout the everbloom- ing summer foliage, one may see every thing that we have done and yet are doing, the whole fucking dualistic system, our domain, beyond endurance a lopsided world, the which behold: it’s altogether good . for nothing. * Through prehistory traps very likely harvested more food than hunting expeditions; from the get-go what best characterized humans was less brute force than sheer craftiness. † The latter follow wildcat in the dictionary, if not in life or in evolution. ‡ Not to mention subsequent Neanderthals. Is our unique achievement among Hominidae to eradicate competing species cause for pride? § Possibly from a well-founded fear of unfamiliar infectious agents. 7 __3__ Ruthlessly we hack at the tree of the mystery beyond good and evil, think- ing we can rape our Mother Earth and get away with it without kissing the dust; but not so: we forget the fate of old unwitting motherfucker Oedipus. We plough distressing furrows in her lovely face, assuring future gashes to be gouged in our own masks. We treat the soil—our origin, support, and destiny—like so much dirt, hooting at the possibility of virginity. The great- est of delusions: that the world prefers rough treatment, wills to sacrifice itself to those who trample on and spoliate it.* Power is our prime Faith, promising our payoff. The dream that society is doomed without incessant “progress” has transmogrified into a nightmare wherein it is doomed with and by same. Progressively transformed, we have degenerated from our ori- gin as prey to predator to parasite to world-consuming pathogen; the thing that’s new under the sun’s a cancer on the globe.