The Ethics
I can no longer be concerned with god.
If there is a point, it has long since faded
into the nothing of an infinite
violation
of boundary logic. So
I, unlike Spinoza,
conjure an ethics sans
god.
This ethics is a world of vapor,
a world of smoke, of arcane legerdemain
half hidden under a veil,
this ethics is a punch in the
head to dark purpose,
a deck of pornographic trading cards,
a blue hope,
that thing you forgot, remembered, forgot
again, then forgot you forgot.
I scratch out an ethics in fine point against type,
a frail bulwark against onrushing words
like waves, words drifting like
ashy snow
that never melts, the snow falling
on the living and the dead, burying ciphers
[empty] like acorns
forgotten by squirrels,
words torn loose and herded by green capital
into holding pens on vast ranches
deep in Texas,
words that accumulate to words
like capital accumulates to capital,
with no regard to anything
beyond accumulation and attraction,
with emptiness at the very core.
It is the mission of
this ethics to
- have no fear of emptiness at the core
of words.
It is the mission of this ethics
to kick words into forbidden trajectories
to split them like atoms
to create blinding white light.
It is the mission of this ethics
to liberate words from meaning,
but not meanings.
It is the mission of this ethics
to liberate meaning from capital,
from ranches of privilege and tradition.
I am inadequate for
the task,
but I am what is
left.
the essence of things
that cracks open under the weight of a thousand questions
like daggers in the dark-
bright blue day of confidence
turns out
to be a shadow of something else . . .
that something else is behind a screen,
and we’ve created the blue, or the screen,
or both
or everything
or nothing
“There is a proof for that”
sez Spinoza
“and it goes like this:
Jesus died for your sins;
but there are no sins,
no death,
and no Jesus.
There’s a red wheelbarrow,
and maybe Billie the Kid
but fuck that taxonomy, anyway
more or less depends on them
than you’ve been led to believe. ”
I awake to a cold bright day
and understand that I am alone
and what is left
is to breathe deep the air
and begin again,
always again
There is another way,
there is always another way.
* * * * *
Spinoza clears his throat:
“What the masses learned to accept without reason
reason cannot refute.
And pretty baubles and grand gestures
trip the light and sell the rabble
while logic becomes dressed as witchcraft
and is danced
from fear
to shame,
and returns,
hollowed out,
as sham and excuse.
My beautiful mathematics require commitment most find beyond
the pale:
Fascists bully words to their own purpose,
while Capitalists simply purchase meaning.
The rest lack all vision.
I sit here in the corpse-colored twilight,
tallow candle a-sputter,
and commit truth to the page
against all odds.”
(Spinoza doesn’t write poetry by the light of day.)
* * * * *
PART ONE
“There are truths
and they are
self-evident.”
Spinoza emerges into
a cold dawn
candle extinguished,
sheaves of parchment falling from his table,
drifting snow,
flesh snow
“or, as they should
be, at least.
Everything follows
inexorably,
a calculus of the
real,
a shape of what is.
Only fools question
the otherwise,
for here is here.”
There is a wave and
a shuffle
Spinoza turns his
face to the cold sun.
“Your investments
mean nothing to me.
Your lineage
means nothing to me.
Your rights, your
culture,
that house of straw
that you defend with
your dying breath?
It means nothing to
me.
The essence of
mankind
does not involve
the necessary
existence of mankind;
this sun cares not
that you caper below it.
You are, that’s
all.”
Spinoza scrambles
off,
rocks spraying from
his feet,
then turns for a
last salvo:
“The order of things
is the order of thought.
The mind is nothing not constituted by idea.
Idea is the thing,
idea is the flow
mind the machine
buckling down and locking in to the flow.
The idea creates the mind
the mind delimits the idea
and its all connected,
virtually the same . . .
bodies in respect to bodies
machines in respect to machines
bodies assembled
and bodies inscrutable
machines and flows inextricable
from what wellspring?
to what ocean?”
He turned abruptly
to the stone path
rising above him
and was gone in a
clatter.
* * * * *
A word can’t mean
two things
it can mean one
thing, then another
Or it can mean
everything,
or the nothing at
the core of everything.
