This is a frottage I did in Denver about 1992. I was wandering around talking to myself, making rubbings of anything that was relatively flat and had raised or incised shapes, patterns, or texture. The "rain bird" was a rubbing of the top of a lawn sprinkler. I offer it as the blog-image equivalent of a rain dance.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
RAIN BIRD
This is a frottage I did in Denver about 1992. I was wandering around talking to myself, making rubbings of anything that was relatively flat and had raised or incised shapes, patterns, or texture. The "rain bird" was a rubbing of the top of a lawn sprinkler. I offer it as the blog-image equivalent of a rain dance.
WEATHER UPDATE
Those promisingly dark clouds blew away. The temperature dropped enough that it felt like winter for a few hours. Today Tulsa had another sunny, breezy, warm Not-Winter day. We don't have Winter in NE Oklahoma anymore. We used to have Winter for about three weeks, but now we're down to a few days of half-hearted snow and sleet. Kyoto has some rain in its forecast, why can't we?
Friday, January 20, 2006
RAIN, RAIN, COME AGAIN?
I don't know that it matters to the wider blog-o-sphere, but it looks like it might rain here in Tulsa this morning. Oklahoma has been in a drought so long we can barely remember what rain is. Little drops of water falling from clouds in the sky, right? Makes the earth smell good. Yes, that's it. There's poetry in it, too.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
ZEN JUDAISM
A bit of flotspam (or is it jetspam?) just washed up in my Inbox via the esteemed Dancing Elder Brother Dave:
If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?
Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?
Drink tea and nourish life.
With the first sip... joy.
With the second... satisfaction.
With the third, peace.
With the fourth, a danish.
Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.
Accept misfortune as a blessing.
Do not wish for perfect health or a life without problems.
What would you talk about?
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single "oy."
There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?
Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness.
And then what do you have? Bupkes.
The Tao does not speak.
The Tao does not blame.
The Tao does not take sides.
The Tao has no expectations.
The Tao demands nothing of others.
The Tao is not Jewish.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.
Let your mind be as a floating cloud.
Let your stillness be as the wooded glen.
And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.
Be patient and achieve all things.
Be impatient and achieve all things faster.
To Find the Buddha, look within.
Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers.
Each flower blossoms ten thousand times.
Each blossom has ten thousand petals.
You might want to see a specialist.
To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance,
do the following: get rid of the motorcycle.
What were you thinking?
Be aware of your body.
Be aware of your perceptions.
Keep in mind that not every physical sensation
is a symptom of a terminal illness.
The Torah says," Love thy neighbor as thyself."
The Buddha says there is no "self."
So, maybe you are off the hook.
The Buddha taught that one should practice lovingkindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?
Though only your skin, sinews, and bones remain,
though your blood and flesh dry up and wither away,
yet shall you meditate and not stir
until you have attained full Enlightenment.
But, first, a little nosh.
If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?
Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?
Drink tea and nourish life.
With the first sip... joy.
With the second... satisfaction.
With the third, peace.
With the fourth, a danish.
Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.
Accept misfortune as a blessing.
Do not wish for perfect health or a life without problems.
What would you talk about?
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single "oy."
There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?
Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness.
And then what do you have? Bupkes.
The Tao does not speak.
The Tao does not blame.
The Tao does not take sides.
The Tao has no expectations.
The Tao demands nothing of others.
The Tao is not Jewish.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.
Let your mind be as a floating cloud.
Let your stillness be as the wooded glen.
And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.
Be patient and achieve all things.
Be impatient and achieve all things faster.
To Find the Buddha, look within.
Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers.
Each flower blossoms ten thousand times.
Each blossom has ten thousand petals.
You might want to see a specialist.
To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance,
do the following: get rid of the motorcycle.
What were you thinking?
Be aware of your body.
Be aware of your perceptions.
Keep in mind that not every physical sensation
is a symptom of a terminal illness.
The Torah says," Love thy neighbor as thyself."
The Buddha says there is no "self."
So, maybe you are off the hook.
The Buddha taught that one should practice lovingkindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?
Though only your skin, sinews, and bones remain,
though your blood and flesh dry up and wither away,
yet shall you meditate and not stir
until you have attained full Enlightenment.
But, first, a little nosh.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
BEST OR (TENT) SHOW: LATE NITE SERMONETTE
On the Appeal of Fragments and Loving Shakespeare Too Much
Fragments are often more tantalizing and evocative than an entire work. Many ruins look better bleached and broken than they did when new and whole. I think this is why reconstructions and restorations are so often unsatisfactory even if absolutely accurate. Restoration robs the ruin of its power to conjure the ages it has withstood, to ensorcell our imaginations as we walk among the the scarred reliefs and tumbled stones. Rock of ages, cleft for me.
Sappho beguiles us so because her work lives in fragments. In little mysterious phrases. "[ ] to melema tonon* [ ]" The transcriptions of papyrus and vellum fragments from classical times often have more brackets than words. All that austerely beautiful pentalic marble in the Parthenon was painted in bright primary colors, after the sculptors and stonemasons finished up. Giantess Athena tricked out in ivory and gold like a right tart.I say this even tho' I know our ancient heritage is being degraded by pollution, defaced or destroyed by fanatics and thugs, and loved to death by tourists. Preservation and restoration are absolutely essential. But when I held a broken piece of Etruscan pottery in my hand, or when I was walking down a little sandstone canyon in Nevada, and suddenly saw like a blind man regaining sight the petroglyphs on the walls all around me, weathered by time and defaced by vandals, that is when the ghosts began whispering up my spine.
Fragments appeal because we ourselves are great jumbled collections of fragments. The unity of human personality and memory is an illusion, and the part is often greater than the whole. The pseudonyms we adopt for ourselves in our blogs are the little fictions that belie the greater fiction that we are integrated unambiguous whole persons. If we don't have multiple personalities we have multiple personas, and we rearrange our mental furniture to suit the current passion play. Sifting the detritus and mementos of a stranger's life, whether at an estate sale or in the pages of a blog, is a way of trying on another history, playing all the parts in someone else's miracle play.
Our brains are built for pattern recognition, to an evolutionary fare-thee-well. Human beings are as overspecialized in this regard as cheetahs or impalas are for speed. This hardwired trait to seek meaningful pattern and integration is the driver of all religion, art, poetry, conspiracy theories and physics. It is a cruel joke we play on ourselves due to an endowment of natural selection, a gift of survival from our hominid ancestors. That is what I say, until I doff my reductionist's pith helmet, and put on my mystic's sombrero.
Since our nerve tissue extends to every part of our bodies, it seems to me that our minds are most likely conterminous with our bodies, and that congress of the confederated states of consciousness known as the self receives not just sensory impressions but thoughts from all parts of the body; not just the cerebral tissue, but from memories from muscles, meditations from the marrow in the bone. Most men have been accused of letting their private parts think for them at one time or another.
I have a weakness for using fragments, lines and phrases from Shakespeare (and other venerable bards and bardettes) as a kind of poetic shorthand for a particular mood or idea, and also a weakness for employing bible verses as a kind of punctuation, often at the end of a poem, as with the quote from the prophet Micah at the end of Lachesis. It's old fashioned to say so, but Shakespeare and the scholars who translated the King James Bible virtually invented the English language as we now have it, between them. Eradicating their pervasive influence from our language would be like removing the oxygen originally created by ancient cyanobacteria two and a half billion years ago from the air we breath. There are, however, several problems with my working tidbits of these titans into my poetry like a bowerbird insinuates foil and bits of ribbon into his palace of grass and twigs. The first difficulty is that people for the most part do not read Shakespeare or the Bible anymore. Many Xtians I know are surprised and appalled to hear some of the things I can quote chapter and verse from their "Good Book." I have been to many a poetry reading at which I heard a "pote" read a "pome" stuffed with tropes or conceits from Shakespeare or even Chaucer that said "pote" when questioned insisted that he (and mostly they were he) had just thought up himself ten minutes ago or the day before yesterday. I consciously write in these borrowed words as if I thought my reader or listener would immediately catch the reference when I know perfectly well it's not true in most cases. The second difficultly is that they are borrowed. Unless I can put a new twist in the tail of a scavenged word, phrase, or metaphor, I don't think I'm doing it poetic justice or my job as a poet. But I love my shiny bits of language I have stolen from the trash heap of human culture. That's third difficultly; I love them, too much.
*"The beloved one"
(Originally published in Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival 11.7.03)
Fragments are often more tantalizing and evocative than an entire work. Many ruins look better bleached and broken than they did when new and whole. I think this is why reconstructions and restorations are so often unsatisfactory even if absolutely accurate. Restoration robs the ruin of its power to conjure the ages it has withstood, to ensorcell our imaginations as we walk among the the scarred reliefs and tumbled stones. Rock of ages, cleft for me.
Sappho beguiles us so because her work lives in fragments. In little mysterious phrases. "[ ] to melema tonon* [ ]" The transcriptions of papyrus and vellum fragments from classical times often have more brackets than words. All that austerely beautiful pentalic marble in the Parthenon was painted in bright primary colors, after the sculptors and stonemasons finished up. Giantess Athena tricked out in ivory and gold like a right tart.I say this even tho' I know our ancient heritage is being degraded by pollution, defaced or destroyed by fanatics and thugs, and loved to death by tourists. Preservation and restoration are absolutely essential. But when I held a broken piece of Etruscan pottery in my hand, or when I was walking down a little sandstone canyon in Nevada, and suddenly saw like a blind man regaining sight the petroglyphs on the walls all around me, weathered by time and defaced by vandals, that is when the ghosts began whispering up my spine.
Fragments appeal because we ourselves are great jumbled collections of fragments. The unity of human personality and memory is an illusion, and the part is often greater than the whole. The pseudonyms we adopt for ourselves in our blogs are the little fictions that belie the greater fiction that we are integrated unambiguous whole persons. If we don't have multiple personalities we have multiple personas, and we rearrange our mental furniture to suit the current passion play. Sifting the detritus and mementos of a stranger's life, whether at an estate sale or in the pages of a blog, is a way of trying on another history, playing all the parts in someone else's miracle play.
Our brains are built for pattern recognition, to an evolutionary fare-thee-well. Human beings are as overspecialized in this regard as cheetahs or impalas are for speed. This hardwired trait to seek meaningful pattern and integration is the driver of all religion, art, poetry, conspiracy theories and physics. It is a cruel joke we play on ourselves due to an endowment of natural selection, a gift of survival from our hominid ancestors. That is what I say, until I doff my reductionist's pith helmet, and put on my mystic's sombrero.
Since our nerve tissue extends to every part of our bodies, it seems to me that our minds are most likely conterminous with our bodies, and that congress of the confederated states of consciousness known as the self receives not just sensory impressions but thoughts from all parts of the body; not just the cerebral tissue, but from memories from muscles, meditations from the marrow in the bone. Most men have been accused of letting their private parts think for them at one time or another.
I have a weakness for using fragments, lines and phrases from Shakespeare (and other venerable bards and bardettes) as a kind of poetic shorthand for a particular mood or idea, and also a weakness for employing bible verses as a kind of punctuation, often at the end of a poem, as with the quote from the prophet Micah at the end of Lachesis. It's old fashioned to say so, but Shakespeare and the scholars who translated the King James Bible virtually invented the English language as we now have it, between them. Eradicating their pervasive influence from our language would be like removing the oxygen originally created by ancient cyanobacteria two and a half billion years ago from the air we breath. There are, however, several problems with my working tidbits of these titans into my poetry like a bowerbird insinuates foil and bits of ribbon into his palace of grass and twigs. The first difficulty is that people for the most part do not read Shakespeare or the Bible anymore. Many Xtians I know are surprised and appalled to hear some of the things I can quote chapter and verse from their "Good Book." I have been to many a poetry reading at which I heard a "pote" read a "pome" stuffed with tropes or conceits from Shakespeare or even Chaucer that said "pote" when questioned insisted that he (and mostly they were he) had just thought up himself ten minutes ago or the day before yesterday. I consciously write in these borrowed words as if I thought my reader or listener would immediately catch the reference when I know perfectly well it's not true in most cases. The second difficultly is that they are borrowed. Unless I can put a new twist in the tail of a scavenged word, phrase, or metaphor, I don't think I'm doing it poetic justice or my job as a poet. But I love my shiny bits of language I have stolen from the trash heap of human culture. That's third difficultly; I love them, too much.
*"The beloved one"
(Originally published in Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival 11.7.03)
Friday, January 13, 2006
BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: GRENDEL'S LAUNDRY LIST
Readings from Martin Luther King:
Nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. "I must be first." "I must be supreme." "Our nation must rule the world." And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit. And I'm going to continue to say it to America, because I love this country too much to see the drift that it has taken.
God didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world now. God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.
But God has a way of even putting nations in their place. The God that I worship has a way of saying, "Don't play with me." He has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the Hebrews, "Don’t play with me, Israel. Don't play with me, Babylon. Be still and know that I'm God. And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power." And that can happen to America. Every now and then I go back and read Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And when I come and look at America, I say to myself, the parallels are frightening.
The Drum Major instinct, 4 Feb. 1967
I'm concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice; I'm concerned about brotherhood; I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.
We must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?"
I'm not talking about communism. What I'm talking about is far beyond communism. My inspiration didn't come from Karl Marx; my inspiration didn't come from Engels; my inspiration didn't come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn't come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago, and I saw that maybe Marx didn't follow Hegel enough. He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism.
Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.
Where Do We Go From Here, 16 Aug. 1967
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us…
The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.
I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions: We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
The need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies… A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.
We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."
A Time to Break Silence, 4 April 1967
Nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. "I must be first." "I must be supreme." "Our nation must rule the world." And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit. And I'm going to continue to say it to America, because I love this country too much to see the drift that it has taken.
God didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world now. God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.
But God has a way of even putting nations in their place. The God that I worship has a way of saying, "Don't play with me." He has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the Hebrews, "Don’t play with me, Israel. Don't play with me, Babylon. Be still and know that I'm God. And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power." And that can happen to America. Every now and then I go back and read Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And when I come and look at America, I say to myself, the parallels are frightening.
The Drum Major instinct, 4 Feb. 1967
I'm concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice; I'm concerned about brotherhood; I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.
We must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?"
I'm not talking about communism. What I'm talking about is far beyond communism. My inspiration didn't come from Karl Marx; my inspiration didn't come from Engels; my inspiration didn't come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn't come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago, and I saw that maybe Marx didn't follow Hegel enough. He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism.
Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.
Where Do We Go From Here, 16 Aug. 1967
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us…
The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.
I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions: We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
The need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies… A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.
We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."
A Time to Break Silence, 4 April 1967
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