From Soulard’s Notebooks October 25, 2015 Home—green couch Melrose, Massachusetts Dear President Obama, This begins my ninth letter to ou,y seventh since you’ve been the sitting American President. I’ve written to you annually since 2008, & also publish each letter in my independent literary journal, The Cenacle. My support for your administration reached a nadir last year, as I finally came to grips with my romantic illusions of your 2008 campaign versus the raw truths of you in office. The feelings ofbitterness & distrust I still feel have directly affected my view of those running to be elected your successor in 2016. TheRepublicans seem to be engaging in their quadrennial clown contest, again mistakenly thinking that racy quips on TV news talk shows do any of the work of convincing tens of millions of people to consider seriously casting their votes for any of them. They put the stu- in stupid. The -pid too. But neither do the Democrats engage me much. Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, whoever else, will talk a good game now; one of them will likely even talk right on through to Election Day victory. But once the Inauguration Day speech is given, what then? A special-interest-entrenched Congress, accomplishing less & less each passing session. What then? Strangely, I’ve still kept my attention, when it drifts to politics, on what you are doing now. You’ve been taking more action outside of Congress in your second term than you ever considered before. In particular, & crucially, & honestly this issue alone is making me reconsider your presidency, you’ve been pushing harder & harder to get action on the growing climate disaster slowly overtaking the world. You’ve used executive actions to circumvent a paralyzed Congress to cut America’s carbon pollution; brokered a similar deal with China; & now look seriously all in with regards to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris this December. Regarding this meeting of nearly 200 countries, you recently told Rolling Stone that what’s needed is a “joint international commitment that is well-defined and can be measured.”1 To assure that everybody is “locked in,” in terms of taking this global catastrophe seriously, & committing the time, manpower, & money it will take. In that interview, you don’t indicate that the Paris Climate Summit will be enough, or that anything you are doing by executive order now is sufficient. But you do say the following: “I don’t want to get paralyzed by the magnitude of this thing. I’m a big believer that the imagination can solve problems.” The easonr why your approach on this appeals to me, Mister President, is because it rings in my ears of the “Yes We Can!” idealism by which you won the presidency. With important differences. First of all, maybe most importantly, is the “we.” The “we” now is the whole human race. “We” caused this crisis, albeit some more than others, & “we” must solve it. Too slowly, too messily, but at it & at it & at it. Your belief is that as the climate disaster strikes more & more of the world, the bogus counter-arguments will dissolve away. It’s proving true. The we”“ is all of us, our failed stewardship of the planet, our insane assumption that we are its stewards, that we do not simply belong to this world, as does all creation within its atmosphere. The we”“ comprises the hundreds of nations & cultures & thousands of languages. Simple truth is that every one of us has to breathe, has to eat, & cannot live for more than a short while outside 1. Jeff Goodell, “Obama Takes on Climate Change,” Rolling Stone, Issue 1245, 08.October.2015. of this wonderful, powerful, fragile, human-damaged eco-system. Second of all, because I think your years in office have matured & tempered you, some. You’ve been humbled to the corporate-media-political power structure that you seemed to think would bend more than a little to your will, to your sense of right action. You’ve had to learn how to govern when those around you would rather see millions go jobless, millions live with second-class citizenship, millions suffer poor & die, than agree with you or work with you. A lot of those men & women in Congress are heartless motherfuckers no reason or compromise will move. I see your work on the climate catastrophe as a natural extension of what you’ve done with issues such as healthcare, drug policy reform, & gay rights. You at least nudged those in progressive directions. This issue, though, is something even more substantive than those, & it’s not hard to foresee your advocacy extending beyond your time in office. I think it will consume a good part of your time hereon. For this, we all should be grateful. We need every powerful voice we can get. So even as I will eventually take a better look at next year’s candidates, I will very likely be measuring them against how you have fared in office since 2008. Your failures, your victories, how you’ve changed, where you’ve matured. I’ll keep asking myself, more or less, “would he or she fare better or worse on this than Obama?” But I’ll continue watching you as you begin your last full year in office. Will you arrive to 2016 high on the hopes raised at the Paris Climate Summit? Will you push on with it, staking your presidential capital on this most crucial of matters? Will you press the Democratic Party & its chosen candidate to commit to the fight at their 2016 convention? Will you bring a fully revived & wonderfully matured vision of “Yes We Can!” to the question: “Can we save this beautiful place, our home?”? Are you done with the bullshit that bogged you down so long? Are you ready again to say “Yes We Can!”? Peace, Scriptor Press New England scriptorpress.com Assistant Editor: Kassandra Soulard Secret Joy Amongst These Times: The History of Scriptor Press by Raymond Soulard, Jr. 1 Poetry by Joe Coleman 29 Lull, or Scenes from Everyday Life [Travel Journal] by Nathan D. Horowitz 33 Poetry by Judih Haggai 41 Bags End Book #3: Bags End Gets a F by Algernon Beagle 47 Poetry by Martina Newberry 69 Homeless in Hawaii [Travel Journal] by Charlie Beyer 71 Poetry by Colin James 77 Notes from New England [Commentary] by Raymond Soulard, Jr. 83 Poetry by Walt Whitman 89 Fahrenheit, Electricity, and a Flexible Flyer [Fiction] by Tom Sheehan 95 Many Musics [Poetry] by Raymond Soulard, Jr. 99 How the Warlocks Passed the Acid Tests [Interview] by Dean Budnick 133 Labyrinthine [A New Fixtion] by Raymond Soulard, Jr. 137 Notes on Contributors 166 2015 Front and back cover graphic artwork by Raymond Soulard, Jr. & Kassandra Soulard. Original Cenacle logo by Barbara Brannon. Interior graphic artwork by Raymond Soulard, Jr. & Kassandra Soulard, unless otherwise noted. Accompanying disk to print version contains: • Cenacles #47-94 • Burning Man Books #1-66 • Scriptor Press Sampler #1-16 • RaiBooks #1-8 • RS Mixes from “Within’s Within: Scenes from the Psychedelic Revolution”; & • Jellicle Literary Guild Highlights Series Disk contents downloadable at: http://www.scriptorpress.com/cenacle/supplementary_disk.zip. The Cenacle is published quarterly (with occasional special issues) by Scriptor Press New England, 2442 NW Market Street, #363, Seattle, Washington, 98107. It is kin organ to ElectroLounge website (http://www.scriptorpress.com), RaiBooks, Burning Man Books, Scriptor Press Sampler, The Jellicle Literary Guild, & “Within’s Within: Scenes from the Psychedelic Revolution w/Soulard,” broadcast online worldwide weekends on SpiritPlants Radio (http://www.spiritplantsradio.com). All rights of works published herein belong exclusively to the creator of the work. Email comments to: [email protected]. Thank ouy to the makers of Fitbit for creating a coherent & comprehensive system for achieving better health. For helping KD & I to collaborate with you & each other on finally starting to get it right. 1 Raymond Soulard, Jr. Secret Joy Amongst These Times: The History of Scriptor Press, 1995 to the Present “Think for yourself & question authority.” —Dr. Timothy Leary Chapter Seventeen continued from The Cenacle| 81 | June 2012 Read the full History at: http://scriptorpress.com/history_of_scriptor_press.pdf When I think The Cenacle, & what it is to me, so many years doing it, I think: it’s news. My news. The news of my friends, near & far. It is now a quarterly journal, has been since 2008, which structures somewhat what it can & cannot be. It’s funny, or maybe not so much, that the more society speeds up, or seems to, the more I prefer to let The Cenacle remain what it is. Writing, photography, artwork. The product of several months’ labor toward it. The best of those labors. I don’t think, really don’t think, that society’s harder push toward . something . has solved, or even addressed the eternal puzzles of the human experience. Mortality. Sex. Loneliness. Nature. How to live & why. All the obsessive online blogging & Facebooking does not shred one inch of the distance between any of us. Valuable like an extra blanket on a solitary, shivering soul. It became a single thing, as maybe it always has been: living on the West Coast, & going annually to the Burning Man Arts Festival. While I started attending in 1999, it was like I’d been aiming West even before that. Burning Man became for me something good, & current, to focus on. I’ve detailed my relationship with this festival in previous chapters of this history; my concern here, recounting 2010, is how I decided to stop going, & what that was like.