Manifesto

Jan 18, 2008 - 15:12 PM PST


Some of my ideas are right and some of my ideas are obnoxious and also right. For instance: I have no interest in writing a blog. I don’t want to sit here all day, writing out my self-absorbed reflections on life daily. That time would be better spent doing any of the following:

Gardening
Sleeping
Exercising
Keeping my computer off and saving energy
Enjoying the earth
Looking at space through a telescope
Reading the great philosophers
Taking a bus across the country
Trying to learn an African language or a similar language of an oppressed people

And many other things.

But so long as having a page like this seems like a necessary social step in this bizarre post Weberian world of ours, I will write this one blog entry now and it will be my manifesto for all to see.

Right now, while you read this, forests are being cut down, forest are burning, women are being raped and oppressed, good governments are being ruined by the machinations of bad governments and cynical people are giving money to cynical people to get what they want. You can do something about it.

You can volunteer. Just literally spend an hour on a site like idealist.com and see what there is in your area that you could be doing, even for a couple hours a week. And if we all did it for a couple hours a week, we could actually change the world. Or even craigslist.com. Or just go to a local park or school, or church or shelter.

We should have mandatory service in this country. Some people could do the military, some people could farm, some people could teach in public schools, and so on. So that we were all invested, and we all knew what it costs to run a government and what it costs to neglect a government.

I also reserve the right to change my mind about this blogging. Who knows, maybe someday I will wake up and say, I have to blog right now, I have to sit down and tell the world (or the few who are reading it) what I feel. If I do have that feeling, I will get up and write a blog without a shred of shame that I have changed my mind, because I think it is every person’s political and personal right to change their mind, even to contradict themselves. As first heard, of course, from the great Walt Whitman:

I CELEBRATE myself;
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my Soul;
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass. 5

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are crowded with perfumes;
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it;
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume—it has no taste of the distillation—it is odorless;
It is for my mouth forever—I am in love with it; 10
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked;
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

2

The smoke of my own breath;
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine;
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs; 15
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn;
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice, words loos’d to the eddies of the wind;
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms;
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag;
The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides; 20
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems; 25
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—(there are millions of suns left
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books;
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me:
You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself.


I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end; 30
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. 35

Urge, and urge, and urge;
Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance—always substance and increase, always sex;
Always a knit of identity—always distinction—always a breed of life.

To elaborate is no avail—learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so. 40

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery, here we stand.