notes for my silent & unknown comrades of certain composition

it might surprise some of you how much of me is or was politically conservative. raised with a near-apolitical outlook and my life-long leaning toward various radical views on either end of the spectrum, i once self-identified with the Libertarians until i began to discern their fractured and blinder'd vision as a party and as individuals (of course, i find myself warm to lower-case libertarianism). i have little faith in our dominant parties and even less for the minor parties that have sprung (Reform (pre- or post-split), Green, whatever).

i am not keen on the concept of heroes but when the subject comes up, i immediately think of John Brooks Wheelwright. Alan Wald, in The Revolutionary Imagination: The Poetry and Politics of John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan, serves a brilliant description of Wheelwright the man, the poet and the activist, a description that i can only fail to condense for you here. the thing i wanted to mention was that Wald described Wheelwright's early political outlook (prior to his taking up communism/socialism) as "anarchopatrician", a concept i would have happily called my own when i was young even if i have no connection to any sort of aristocracy and despite the fast-disappearing patriarch-matriach mold of a culture i sprang from but have never fully embraced. i find that i have been more a party to anarchism, poor misunderstood umbrella term, however i must note that i find it mostly undoable &/or impractical; i won't pretend to make any understand that which they would only argue over than investigate and i probably couldn't even if i tried.

my innate distrust of groups, authority and institutions precludes my identification with any particular organization built on a set of ideals. like Wheelwright (or most anyone who cares to be a citizen of the world), i have a complex & awkward relationship with religion, politics, my station in life and the universe. the other day i had a strange moment of clarity, a vision, if you will, in which i felt filled with grace. i imagined i possessed a kind of Calvinistic grace but that wasn't right. i eschew deterministic values when i can and i thought to myself that it was not Calvin's grace that i felt but it was a grace born of & that bears a discipline & misfortune all its own.

this corruption, as i think of it, is born of my thorniest beliefs, that, like nails, hair or our worse moments, have become ingrown. bride to my own groom, i'd sooner have been happy a bridesmaid at my own wedding.

let me interject with some good news: Court upholds church use of hallucinogenic tea

section VII of Wallace Stevens' "Lettres d'un Soldat":

La seule sanction pour moi est ma conscience. Il faut mous confier à une justice impersonelle, indépendante de tout facteur humain; et à une destinée utile et harmonieuse malgré toute horreur de forme.

Negation

Hi! The creator too is blind,
Struggling toward his harmonious whole,
Rejecting intermediate parts --
Horrors and falsities and wrongs;
Incapable master of all force,
Too vague idealist, overwhelmed
By an afflatus that persists.
For this, then, we endure brief lives,
The evanescent symmetries
From that meticulous potter's thumb.


[the epigraph reads: "The only safeguard for me is my conscience. It is necessary for us to trust in an impersonal justice, independent of any human factor; and in a useful, harmonious destiny despite its horrible form."]

[Stevens chose the epigraphs from Lettres d'un soldat (1916), a book of letters sent home frmo the western front by a French soldier named Eugéne Emmannuel Lemercier.]