Placating Moloch!?

 

 So I’m stuck between being able to speak in poetry or in digitalize. I want to go back to a resounding, before the age of plastic. Having read somewhere that before 1950 (or so) 90 odd percent of all materials people touched were of 6 main types: wood, glass, metal, food, ceramics and clothes, it’s clear we live suspended now in complex ingredients electrified by information. And it’s materially crazy, if you catch my drift, whereby sanity is clarity and for humans we have none available, once you’ve been sucked up into this sphere of beyond-plastic, could we call it the informatized-plasticized-electrified-earth-material reality? IPEEM. There is no clarity there and thus no sanity. And yet since it comes from the earth, in itself it’s confusing. Perhaps the best name for it is Moloch after all. As first mentioned by Rexroth and then triumphantly named and echoed into the stratosphere, alongside the cosmonauts and astronauts, by Ginsberg.
But I’m surprised it wasn’t mentioned by Diane DiPrima in ‘The Only War That Matters is the War Against the Imagination’. However I do see a tendency towards equality between the genders in that poem of course, and maybe ‘Moloch’, the word itself, is too testosterone filled, of course, and she didn’t even consider it, seeing as how it might be better to not even engage with that energy. You know, non-violence and all, which had it’s moment with Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi -the freedom of millions being won daily, in those heady days. So, no mention of Moloch and I’m proposing it’s a continuing line of energy worship, witness the continuing strength of punk rock, and metal, and cookie monster vocalizing.
I myself, have been vocalizing in my free form jam sessions with Fundrazers more like a chorus, towards that. With a little cookie monster and some ad lib almost gibberish. I once heard at my small Quaker boarding school, when I was around 15, a man get down on his knees at Meeting for Worship and do a whole speaking-in-tongues sing songy message to all of us youngster filling that light glazed meeting house, with the tall ceiling and the empty wooden benches up in the balconies. And it sounded fabulous and enlightening.
But I’m listening to Arvo Part, a contemporary Estonian composer, who evidently is mystically Catholic. And I’m understanding that if you want to have fifty or so people singing together, with clarity, its going to be clear notes sung by each and long tones are tending. Yea, sure it might be chanting or intertwining like Phillip Glass but it also might be long clear tones. And strange harmonies. If you want to ‘transcend’, fly out of, and soar above the fray of the war of Moloch. To look down and see the chaos, the pulse within there matching up to drums of the monotheistic and pagan apocalypse. Ah, the face of Moloch, the eyes flashing will freeze your bones, no doubt. Make them lighter I suppose, so you can fly higher.

 

PS I've just learned when searching for the above image that Moloch liked to sacrifice children. How f----g appropriate! Completes the story, during this phase of human existence where we see 'Childhood's End'. An interesting sci-fi story by Arther C. Clark published in 1953.