Note: Announcement today slightly skews, but does not change, my perspective. If anything, like his late answer on a public option, it reinforces the point.

Gay marriage is becoming this news cycle’s public option debate. The problem Obama now faces is not whether he supports it, or how the political fallout of supporting it might affect him. The problem is that while he dithers, the issue burns, and has already now bypassed him. Lack of resolve quickly becomes lack of relevance. 

And now, what he has to face is not the courage of owning up to a position, but the fear of whether he even has the moral authority as a leader for his position to matter. It seems that is the source of hesitation, more than his need for his position to “evolve.” No matter how evolved or un-evolved it is, the time for taking a position is past. Coming out with one now only would only force him to recognize that what he thinks of the issue doesn’t matter, and he does not want to come to terms with that recognition, especially if stating a position is forced on him by circumstances. Once again, his opportunity to lead has been squandered. It’s not “leading from behind” it’s “failing to lead while behind.”

What poetry, as clearing projection, unfolds of unconcealment and projects ahead into the rift-design of the figure, is the open region which lets poetry happen, and indeed in such a way that only now, in the midst of beings, the open region brings beings to chime and ring out.

– M.H.

The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are at hand. But neither is it a merely imagines framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonbobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being. Wherever those utterly essential decisions of our history are made, are taken up and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are rediscovered by new inquiry, there the world worlds…By the opening up of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their remoteness and nearness, their scope and limits. In a world’s worlding is gathered that spaciousness out of which the protective grace of the gods is granted or withheld.  Even the doom of the god remaining absent is a way in which the world worlds.

– M.H.

For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me.
I am the mother of my father
and the sister of my husband
and he is my offspring.
I am the slave of him who prepared me.
I am the ruler of my offspring.
But he is the one who begot me before his birth.
And he is my offspring in due time,
and my power is from him.
I am the staff of his power in his youth,
and he is the rod of my old age.
And whatever he wills happens to me.
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.

– Thunder, Perfect Mind (Nag Hammadi Library)

On this May Day, let us declare the absolute end of the subjectivity of labor. Let us relegate the proletariat to its rightful status as a field of raw material in which corporatist sign-exchange takes place. Let us suspend all fictitious and illegitimate ascriptions of so-called rights to human capital. Let us restore the authenticity of relations between bodies and the Nation in a new flowering of a genuine legitimacy of political order.

If you find yourself hating your fellow men and resist this hatred, and you see that it grows weak and withdraws, do not rejoice in your heart; for this withdrawal is a trick of the evil spirits. They are preparing a second attack worse than the first; they have left their troops behind the city and ordered them to remain there. If you go out to attack them, they will flee before you in weakness. But if your heart is then elated because you have driven them away, and you leave the city, some of them will attack you from the rear while the rest will stand their ground in front of you; and your wretched soul will be caught between them with no means of escape.

Nightmares seem better than good dreams, lately. From a nightmare, I can wake up, and getting out of bed seems good by contrast. But from a dream of happiness, contentment, or any other joyful scenario, I wake up, rub my eyes, and then have to muster a great amount of will just to get out of bed.