From “WE MAKE A POLIS”

Or keep your eyes pointed on the state of the world & you’ll never have to
change how you behave toward the people immediately around you.
By Emily Critchley.

Politics from Πολιτικά
‘of, for, or relating to citizens’
/ amongst others
processes by which groups
always of people
make collective decisions
(like poetry, or quality
like good or bad leaders)
applies to institutions
& fields, even special interest
groups (like poetry)
all segments of society
involving authority & power
like who sings most fairly
or who thinks most rightly
from out the polis
this ‘this’ of the people.

Property is my poem
given back to me by people
the ‘right’ to my ‘re-write’
of a group of people
who have the public trust?
the little, not the main
but sometimes to exercise my right
goes against ‘my’ people
in the past, present or future
so the growth of my opinion
like the history of knowledge
which is the history of property
is the history of probably
as institutional structure
as protection in numbers
it is exclusionary as anything
it is invisible as I’m in it

the more man becomes knowledgeable
more world he owns
the more man becomes knowledgeable
more world he owes. [...]

From “Love’s Work”

By Gillian Rose.

Subsequently, I found myself in a routinely tedious faculty meeting, in which, as usual, I carried no presence whatsoever. As drivers insist that the blaring radio aids their concentration on the road, so I always found that a volume open on my lap enabled me to pay the small amount of attention needed to navigate these shallows. When asked with withering detection by the impassive secretary whether the book I was blatantly perusing was good, I nonchalantly replied, “I only read good books.” I responded similarly to her policing my failure to send a note of apology for a meeting that I actually managed to miss, “But I’m not sorry.” On this particular occasion, I was aware of an intense aura emanating from someone whom I had never seen before, an intense, sexual aura, aimed precisely and accurately at my vacant being. “A man,” I wondered, “could there be a man in this meeting?” He looked weather-beaten, his flat, lined faced suffused with a self-consciously alert intelligence and a knowledge of sensual power. I had no idea who he was, and did not pursue the matter.

From “Moby-Dick, or, The Whale”

By Herman Melville.

And though all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or in terrorem, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea.

Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency.