“The Tacoma and the Indianapolis passed a little south of Three Tree Point. … Capt. Coffin pulled down a window and leaned out in the driving rain. The Indianapolis floated by, a dozen squares of light topped by a star. She spoke; three long, lingering blasts. … Capt. Coffin reached for his own whistle cord. Three long blasts. And he let the last blast die away slowly, until it was only a moan in the throat of the whistle. “That’s the last time we pass each other,” he said.”
Author Archives: d.perry
“Wayne Ducheneaux, president of the National Congress of American Indians, testified before Congress on the matter in 1968:
Before all this came about we had our own method of dealing with law-breakers and in settling disputes between members. That all changed when Crow Dog killed Spotted Tail. Of course, our method of dealing with that was Crow Dog should go take care of Spotted Tail’s family, and if he didn’t do that we’d banish him from the tribe. But that was considered too barbaric, and thought perhaps we should hang him like civilized people do, so they passed the Major Crimes Act that said we don’t know how to handle murderers and they were going to show us.”
“In Delaware, there are more than a million registered corporations, meaning there are more corporations than people.”
“An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”
The Haunted Oak by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Pray why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?
My leaves were green as the best, I trow,
And sap ran free in my veins,
But I saw in the moonlight dim and weird
A guiltless victim’s pains.
I bent me down to hear his sigh;
I shook with his gurgling moan,
And I trembled sore when they rode away,
And left him here alone.
They’d charged him with the old, old crime,
And set him fast in jail:
Oh, why does the dog howl all night long,
And why does the night wind wail?
He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath,
And he raised his hand to the sky;
But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear,
And the steady tread drew nigh.
Who is it rides by night, by night,
Over the moonlit road?
And what is the spur that keeps the pace,
What is the galling goad?
And now they beat at the prison door,
“Ho, keeper, do not stay!
We are friends of him whom you hold within,
And we fain would take him away
“From those who ride fast on our heels
With mind to do him wrong;
They have no care for his innocence,
And the rope they bear is long.”
They have fooled the jailer with lying words,
They have fooled the man with lies;
The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn,
And the great door open flies.
Now they have taken him from the jail,
And hard and fast they ride,
And the leader laughs low down in his throat,
As they halt my trunk beside.
Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black,
And the doctor one of white,
And the minister, with his oldest son,
Was curiously bedight.
Oh, foolish man, why weep you now?
‘Tis but a little space,
And the time will come when these shall dread
The mem’ry of your face.
I feel the rope against my bark,
And the weight of him in my grain,
I feel in the throe of his final woe
The touch of my own last pain.
And never more shall leaves come forth
On the bough that bears the ban;
I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,
From the curse of a guiltless man.
And ever the judge rides by, rides by,
And goes to hunt the deer,
And ever another rides his soul
In the guise of a mortal fear.
And ever the man he rides me hard,
And never a night stays he;
For I feel his curse as a haunted bough,
On the trunk of a haunted tree.
One of Land’s celebrated concepts is “hyperstition,” a portmanteau of “superstition” and “hyper” that describes the action of successful ideas in the arena of culture. Hyperstitions are ideas that, once “downloaded” into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles. Hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Nick Land describes hyperstition as “the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies”.
In 2007, the U.N. adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (“The Declaration”), despite the United States abstaining from the vote along with Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. In 2010, President Barack Obama revisited The Declaration and adopted it on behalf of the U.S. However, as recently as 2015, the Gold King Mine contaminated three million gallons of water in the Colorado River which serves as drinking water for the Navajo and Hopi downstream. The federal E.P.A. appropriated $156,000 in reparations for Gold King Mine, while the Flint, Michigan water crisis in 2014 received $80 million in federal funds.
Wašíču is the Lakota and Dakota word for people of Western European descent. It expresses the indigenous population’s perception of the non-natives’ relationship with the land and the indigenous population. Typically it refers to white people but does not specifically mention skin color or race.
A common folk etymology claims that wašíču originates from wašíŋ ičú “he takes fat”
Living in proximity to high levels of pollution or industrial facilities has been linked to serious short-term and long-term health impacts. In what is perhaps the most negative use of Native American lands, the federal government has used reservations for nuclear testing and nuclear waste disposal. Uranium mining, uranium conversion and enrichment, and nuclear weapons testing have all occurred on reservation lands in the past century. After creating the Nevada Test Site on Western Shoshone lands in Nevada, the federal government tested over one thousand atomic weapons on Western Shoshone land between the 1950-90s. The Western Shoshone people call themselves the “most bombed nation on the planet.” Similar activities happened on Paiute Shoshone lands as well.
“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”
Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
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Regarding God, Cioran has noted that “without Bach, God would be a complete second-rate figure” and that “Bach’s music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure”.
…
His mother once said that if she knew how miserable he would have turned out, she would have aborted him, a statement which Cioran described as “liberating”.
…
the misanthrope, as an essentially solitary man, is not a man at all: he must be a monster or a god, a view reflected in the Renaissance view of misanthropy as a “beast-like state”.
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Humanity is a moral disaster. There would have been much less destruction had we never evolved. The fewer humans there are in the future, the less destruction there will still be.
—David Benatar, “The Misanthropic Argument for Anti-natalism”