The Purse-Seine

Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon; daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the phosphorescence of the
    shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting Santa Cruz; off New Year's Point or off
    Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color light on the sea's night-purple; he
    points, and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net.
    They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great labor haul it in.

                                                                         I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when the crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the other of their closing destiny
    the phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted with flame, like a live
    rocket
A comet's tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside the narrowing
Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up to watch; sighing in the dark; the
    vast walls of night
Stand erect to the stars.

                               Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could I help but recall the
    seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared, and a little
    terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together into interdependence; we
    have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival,
    insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is
    closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they shine already. The
    inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers–or revolution, and the
    new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls–or anarchy, the mass-disasters.

                         These things are Progress;
Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps its reason? Or it lets go,
    lets the mood flow
In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria, splintered gleams, crackled
    laughter. But they are quite wrong.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's
    end is death.

 

  Robinson Jeffers

 

 

"The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill."
-Robert Anton Wilson

Bears that dance, bears that dont.

Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a reexamination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped

–The Yuma Daily Sun, June 13, 1982

 From Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West,
    by Cormac McCarthy
 
"And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.
The judge looked about him. He was sat before the fire naked save for his breeches and his hands rested palm down upon his knees. His eyes were empty slots. None among the company harbored any notion as to what this attitude implied, yet so like an icon was he in his sitting that they grew cautious and spoke with circumspection among themselves as if they would not waken something that had better been left sleeping.

… 

 The judge wrote on and then he folded the ledger shut and laid it to one side and pressed his hands together and passed them down over his nose and mouth and placed them palm down on his knees.

 Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

 He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.

 What's a suzerain?

 A keeper. A keeper or overlord.

 Why not say keeper then?

  Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgements.

 Toadvine spat.

 The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.

 Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can aquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said.

 The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

 I don't see what that has to do with catchin birds.

 The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos.

 That would be a hell of a zoo.

 The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so. 

 …

 

 It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be....
War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

 ...

 Men are born for games . . . Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.

…

 Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn.
...

  A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each mans destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites a well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.

…

I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?

  You aint nothing.

   You speak truer than you know.  But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.

  Even a dumb animal can dance.

  The judge sat the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said.

There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the floodlamps.

Bears that dance, bears that don’t."

can't lose what what you lacked at conception

"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception. Mass market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight...It’s time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It’s time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time." 

      - James Ellroy, American Tabloid

Ancient human burial site shows evidence of mass cannibalism: Slaves were skinned and butchered like animals

"Admission to them is through election and they are generally limited: they are not for all... [They reach] beyond the local tribe seeking out friends and members among alien peoples... a particular stress is given in these secret men's societies to a skull cult that is often associated with the headhunt. Ritual cannibalism and pederasty are commonly practiced and there is a highly elaborated use made of drums and masks."

  -Joseph Campbell,  The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology

"Blessed are the strong, for they shall possess the Earth.
Cursed are the weak, for they shall inherit the yoke.
Blessed are the powerful for they shall be reverenced among men - Cursed are the feeble for they shall be blotted out."
  - Might is Right, or Survival of the Fittest, 1890

"Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going
any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder" 
-Leonard Cohen, The Future