Words
make, and have made
a world, that transcends the world
and a life livable in that transcendence.

It is a transcendence achieved
by the minor effects of figurations
and the major effects of the poet’s sense of the world
and of the motive music of his/her poems
and it is the imaginative dynamism of all these analogies together.

— excerpt essay: Effects of Analogy
from The Necessary Angel by Wallace Stevens

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These lines by Wallace Stevens merit publishing.  They are as a shot of adrenaline to the heart to an overdosed, expiring opium addict.  The addict is all of us collectively,  gasping a final breath, the light of consciousness dimming, in a haze of Trumpian trade-war violence dangerous to the world economies.  Failing economies historically have been harbinger to the dogs of war.

Easier to see in miasma of  entertainment media are the outlines of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio.  Two slaughters in pubic spaces, only hours apart.  Is this the analog to mixed martial arts cage fighting: public slaughter?  Theater and the real are merged.

How have we come to live in a nihilistic society?  Collectively enough of us are disoriented, manifestly without hope that we put an enraged, disaffected Punisher, iconic of ourselves  (someone just like me) in the White House.  It follows that some individuals will pick up an assault weapon with a full metal jacket and head to the mall.  A nihilist is a person of strong faith, the faith that she/he has nothing left to lose.

Words we need words to make life livable.  Turn off ESPN.  The incessant entertainment-yammering is rotting our souls.  We are drowning in trivia, in the inconsequential.

Let us speak with one another, listen to one another,  telling the hard truths of our stories.

Words, life-saving adrenaline to the heart.  Let us make a world in which we can live.

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Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883)