Disorder: A Fragmentary Catalogue

[Image: poster for magic act performed by one Harry Kellar (1849-1922) — click for a full view. Later in his life, Kellar mentored Harry Houdini; you can read an admiring account of one of his shows, in a letter from Theodore Roosevelt, at the blog of the TR Center at Dickinson State University. One source I consulted said Kellar also inspired the bald-headed Wizard of Oz in an early edition of the book. (This poster, among others for Kellar’s various illusions, is shown at a number of sites; I found it here.)]

From whiskey river:

Money-Madness

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

And of course, if the multitude is mad
the individual carries his own grain of insanity around with him.

I doubt if any man living hands out a pound note without a pang;
and a real tremor, if he hands out a ten-pound note.

We quail, money makes us quail.
It has got us down, we grovel before it in strange terror.
And no wonder, for money has a fearful cruel power among men.

But it is not money we are so terrified of,
it is the collective money-madness of mankind.
For mankind says with one voice: How much is he worth?
Has he no money? Then let him eat dirt, and go cold.

And if I have no money, they will give me a little bread
so I do not die,
but they will make me eat dirt with it.
I shall have to eat dirt, I shall have to eat dirt
if I have no money.

It is that that I am frightened of.
And that fear can become a delirium.
It is fear of my money-mad fellow-men.

We must have some money
to save us from eating dirt.
And this is all wrong.

Bread should be free,
shelter should be free,
fire should be free
to all and anybody, all and anybody, all over the world.

We must regain our sanity about money
before we start killing one another about it.
It’s one thing or the other.

(D. H. Lawrence [source])

…and:

Many of us are using our spirituality as a way to avoid life, to avoid seeing things we really need to see, to avoid being confronted with our own misunderstandings and illusions. It is very important to know that life itself is often our greatest teacher. Life is full of grace—sometimes it’s wonderful grace, beautiful grace, moments of bliss and happiness and joy, and sometimes it’s fierce grace, like illness, losing a job, losing someone we love, or a divorce. Some people make the greatest leaps in their consciousness when addiction has them on their knees, for example, and they find themselves reaching out for a different way of being. Life itself has a tremendous capacity to show us truth, to wake us up. And yet, many of us avoid this thing called life, even as it is attempting to wake us up.

(Adyashanti [source])

…and:

Loves
(excerpt)

Who isn’t selfish enough
to love zoos? Flamingos, baboons,
iguanas, newts.
Surely evolution has a sense of humor.
Surely the world would be something to love
if it weren’t for us, insatiate,
our history of harm.
How hard even to love oneself,
all those things I’ve done
or dreamed of. Those vengeances.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Bad Weather

What does it matter that this cold June breaks, another dish
on the kitchen floor, skittering under the table legs. 
So it requires the long strawed broom, the extra stoop.
It will have out. When the sun comes back. When the rain stops. 

But something doesn’t fit. Something isn’t fitting.
The washing machine jams and hums too loudly. The chickadees
fall from the trees. A swallow is caught in the chimney.
The smallest ram lamb isn’t eating. The days pass. 

June is too cold. The spiders threaten to overrun the nest
lodged in the rafters. They can’t be eaten fast enough.
The mother, beside herself, has seen this happen only once before,
the eggs draped with gauze. 

No letters come. The small tin flag is down. The house creeps
farther from the road. The grass rises in the rain. The scythes
rust and will not cut. The blades squeak and sigh, nothing
to be done. We close the porch doors, but every night

they open just a little. We hear it from the bedroom, 
a small creak. no one there. The cold lies down in the meadow
where the sheep are credulous and sturdy and dumb, but
the ram lamb will not eat. His mother has already forgotten him.

The windows will not stay shut. Even the small nails
we bang in are loose in the morning, and the screens flap
a little in the small cold wind. From under the covers,
I watch you move around the house, fixing the broken things:

the desk lamp, the toaster, the radio that still will not speak.
The red hens haven’t laid in a week. There’s nothing we can do. 
Nothing. It could be ten years ago. I could be dreaming.
This could be last winter all over again

with the wood stacked and the snow rushing from miles away.
Then too, the trees leaned a little funny and the cat
disappeared for days. Nothing would make him come back.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

We continue to share with our remotest ancestors the most tangled and evasive attitudes about death, despite the great distance we have come in understanding some of the profound aspects of biology. We have as much distaste for talking about personal death as for thinking about it; it is an indelicacy, like talking in mixed company about venereal disease or abortion in the old days. Death on a grand scale does not bother us in the same special way: we can sit around a dinner table and discuss war, involving 60 million volatilized human deaths, as though we were talking about bad weather; we can watch abrupt bloody death every day, in color, on films and television, without blinking back a tear. It is when the numbers of dead are very small, and very close, that we begin to think in scurrying circles. At the very center of the problem is the naked cold deadness of one’s own self, the only reality in nature of which we can have absolute certainty, and it is unmentionable, unthinkable. We may be even less willing to face the issue at first hand than our predecessors because of a secret new hope that maybe it will go away. We like to think, hiding the thought, that with all the marvelous ways in which we seem now to lead nature around by the nose, perhaps we can avoid the central problem if we just become, next year, say, a bit smarter.

“The long habit of living,” said Thomas Browne, “indisposeth us to dying.” These days, the habit has become an addiction: we are hooked on living; the tenacity of its grip on us, and ours on it, grows in intensity. We cannot think of giving it up, even when living loses its zest—even when we have lost the zest for zest.

(Lewis Thomas [source])