There were no power outages reported today; a few isolated
incidents such as a bus in Wisconsin whose ticket machine
had broken when it could not decipher the date.  For these
portents were tea-leaves bred and scanned; the instrument in
the hand of the godhead was a rather small quill, and
quaint.

So, then, with catastrophe again postponed, have the
iconoclastic slide-rulers at last won the day?  Can at last,
the troglodyte preacher return to his cave of consolations,
banished from the forum by an overwhelming weight of facts?

Telos has had its day; its redundancy proselytizes the
religion of chance, most of all to the teleologian.  Keep
your myths, we would say, but deny their return; know that
the motion and spirit cannot be reckoned; accept that the
consideration of ends has outlived its usefulness in the
progress toward that end inconceivable.

Riots did not occur, terrorists were suppressed, the newsmen
are baffled and bereft; Dionysus remains at Hooters.
And so in concert with Apollo’s strength, he might gain
self-esteem as well; and let the Bacchanalians be.  The calf
no longer threatens the Sky; I declare not an end to the war
but a truce!  Blake was right, but his marriage was not
truly of equals.  Heaven and hell must negotiate not a union
but an alliance; a camping-ground in place of a hearth;
space on the shelves.

Energies diverted from crystals and chants, channeled to
soup, bricks, and music; divining rods into pruning hooks;
surplus profits to new wide parks.  

Fear once wise now useless, make way for hope in the
mundane, a rejection of apocalypse, a new interest in
fishing, knitting, and board games.  Space once paved for
parking, stand ground under your easements; the ziggurats
are invisible now, in the air, silver threads with no need
of your inferior, meat-bound convenience.  Stories once told
for order, keep your dividing-lines afloat, let your claims
sink beneath the real, and let people be quiet.

Onward to dash these hopes; but onward to the ordinary,
without slipping into precondition, without becoming dull,
without merciless stupidity winning the day by its close
relation to sense; mundane hopes, lead to gentleness and not
an overabundance of self-concern; our smallness of scale is
not of necessity Narcissus; greed makes it so, not nature.

Spin forward, trivia, into a freedom from insipid baths and 
over-vital tantrums too; navigate these alternate waters
from the new chart reconfigured.
 

Written Jan. 1, 2000
 
 
 
 

Jay Michaelson
jay@metatronics.net