nevermind the bricolage: Stuff

There are snippets of many things running round in my head at present. I have been so incredibly busy that I haven't had much compression time to work things through so I apologize in advance for unresolved ramblings. The continuing crisis of the gulf oil spill has been haunting me. I realize that the are complex issues involved and that decisions around intersecting issues of economic well-being and environmental destruction are never going to be cleanly sorted out, there are so many competing interests. All that aside, I am stunned that the loudest voice is those who argue for a return to drilling, who justify the ongoing reliance on fossil fuel by highlighting the billions of gallons of oil drawn from the pipeline versus the comparatively small amount of oil that has spilled--therefore, conventional wisdom says, in all likelihood a catastrophe like this won't happen again so lets get back to drilling and save jobs...all so very rational and yet, while I appreciate the challenge of economic and employment issues related to the oil industry, I can't help but think that it is a tremendous lack of insight and perhaps ambition in an answer like this. It will take some serious changes to get us away from reliance on fossil fuels, and in spite of the upsurge in interest in alternatives, it is but a murmur compared to the din of those for whom oil means revenue, profit etc., and I wonder if anything will really be different if and when this thing gets sorted. I am old enough to know that ideology is easy and rhetoric even easier to invoke, that change is hard, damn near impossible most of the time, but come on, where is the new thinking?

Which brings me to a second thread. Someone said that politicians campaign with poetry but must govern with prose. I don't know where that came from, but it certainly seems very true when we look at the Obama presidency, which seems to have lost all sense of the poetic in exchange for a lot of politicking that doesn't seem that far removed from the Bush years. Is it possible to 'govern with poetry?' I would like to think so, but I am aware that poetry is often a more complex use of language--the demands of rhyme, meter etc., and that most of the time we use language for function's sake--'communicate clearly'---the contemporary mantra, even when we employ the many double-speaks we have---well, poetry is often far from clear if you ask me. But poetry unlocks not just the potential use of language but the potential for humans to create and make worlds that invite and entice us towards new understandings.

If I take this in a religious direction then Jesus campaigns with the poetry of the kingdom, the poetics of the impossible according to Caputo, and then it is left to Paul to govern, and what do we get? Prose. Parables replaced with dogma, a bit simplistic I know, but there is something there (Zizek has always prompted me here with his comments about the re-invention of Christianity and Marxism in Fragile Absolute--Lenin and Paul being the prose-makers of those two ideologies). But I say all this on the eve of significant shifts in my own relation to the church and I worry that I am immersing myself deeper into prose when poetry is what interests me...For most of my time engaging with churches/faith/religion etc. I have been challenged by the conventional wisdom that we need a prosaic approach to get things done--but the rule of love is seldom held captive, or even helped by prose--and I wonder if it is even true in the long run--our major systems all seem to run on prose, but poetry marked their beginnings (they emerged from dreams and ideas be they temporal or otherwise), and perhaps a return to poetry is the only way things can truly change. I don't even know what I am trying to say, thinking out loud essentially, but I had to get it out of my head n order to get some distance and maybe work some things through, if not to resolve, then at least to some new crossroad