CXXVI
Said General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which, according to the Times is currently “weighing” their options against ISIS: “It’s fair to say that we’re looking to take decisive military action.” [NYT, 1/22/16]
Libertarians Against Weather
[thanks for that, Katie]
Once upon a time in the Middle Kingdom, roughly 2000 B.C., there lived, and died, a fellow named Irtisen who rose to become an “overseer of artisans.” On his grave stele in the sacred city of Abydos, he praises his profession, asserts his place among the social elite and boasts of his esoteric powers. He also relates his knowledge of the poses and proportions used in sculpture and relief, and of recipes for the creation of enduring colors – secrets he will transmit only to his eldest son. “I know,” he says, “the going of a male statue and the coming of a female statue,… the convulsion of the single prisoner,… the expression of fear on the face of enemies,… the leg movements of one running…” [translation by Elisabeth Delange, in Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015, p. 153]
And then, there are the “execration texts,” small pieces of pottery inscribed with denunciations against, and disparagements of, Egypt’s occasional or enduring enemies – among them Nubians, Asiatics and Libyans. Once written, the shards were ritually buried, presumably, as a means of neutralizing the perceived threat.
Book of le coeur pleurant
Arrhythmia and greenish blues.
It’s a good thing breeze rhymes with trees
Seismics matter
(Ch)armed struggle
Truth against poetry… again
The sun also arises
In every crisis, the main question power must solve is how to shift modes of social relations and practice, sometimes radically, while maintaining a continuity of mystification and oppression. Wherefore a primary work of any system of authority is the elaboration of symbols whose purpose is to confuse via elucidation.
The pastoral mode itself is evidence of a separation from the earth
Sixteen little truths scrabbling after a dozen teats. Math says some are going to grow up skinny.
In Flint, MI restaurants, instead of asking patrons if they want bottled or tap water, the waitstaff offers “taps” water, and prepares to play the cornet.
There is a distinction to be observed between sports and transports
The transmigration of bones
The Case of the Meretricious Metrix
The Great Desperation has just begun
too late 4 fear i fear
the ship done sailed
Newly discover’d but been here all the time: the disconcertainty principle
Not so much as that it is wrong to fear, as simply too late to be generative or efficacious
The couch of fair skins, by the cool stream, on which Daphnis lies, is made from the herd driven over a cliff by a gale. This is the oxherd’s ‘ease,’ and the goatherd’s ‘wealth of dreamland’ is many an ewe and many a she-goat, and fleeces from them lying at my head and my feet. And on my fire of oaklogs puddings boil, and dry acorns roast there in wintry weather. [Raymond Williams on Theocritus’ Idylls, from The Country and the City, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 15]
And further: Wolves, foxes, locusts and beetles are as much a part of the experience as balm and rockrose and apples and honey. The herdsman who goes to the festival in Idyll IV, leaves thin bulls and calves, for he has ‘fallen in love with cursed victory’.
The asphalt and stones lay beneath a glaze of ice. The fog walked forty paces ahead of the eye, swathing all things in itself. Snaking around the house on the corner like a long, listless tapeworm, stretched a line: for something. Dodging between automobile horns, Shushashin crossed the crossroad. Another line: baskets hanging from arms, shawls and caps. Shushashin turned down a side street, his eyes seizing on occasional squares of paper showing white on the wall: just in case. “Will dye your things black” – “Will dye anything black. Cheap” – “black”… what the devil… Shushashin jerked his pupils back and walked on, picking out the yellow patches of sand on top of the ice. Then suddenly he nearly knocked into these words emanating from the fog: “Oh, dear sir, from your apartment, you say… But I’ve been evicted from my own head, and I’m all right. But you…” [From Krzhizhanovsky, “Red Snow”]
And she’s climbing the thousand yard stareway to heaven
Doctors Without Noses
Clowns Without Stethoscopes
A Conspiracy Island of the Mind
Peeling decal syndrome
Neither mis nor dis, but rather hmmformation
I was a Rude Mechanical for the FBI
Stepped out in front of and struck dead by a crosstown but –
Kingdom come, Kingdom go
Exogeny, endogeny, doofogeny
Our carpal arch: the ultimate in bone-masonry
Together, the creative (yang) and the receptive (yin) form the relation of the generative
Sitting in Washington Square Park amidst the avian life of the city you tally your age another way: sixteen generations of NYC pigeons.
Social criticism that abstracts humanity out of the natural is delusory
The naked blur
Into the valley of ? rode the seven billion
The fog and friction, the frog and fiction
And the Dow gets more dour by the hour
Ah, the imbeciletude of nevryday strife!
Nimbycilitude, nor front yard neither be
Neither a goatswain nor a boatswain be
Huh!?
Nor a boxwain, coxwain, ticketytoxwain…
One hears not infrequently of a person dying of youth
I was a swineswain for the Gadarene Legion, LLC
The Strange Case of the Texting Vicarette
Let them eat spectacle
Le crêpe au pigeon
The more text, the less contex
Fish out of context
Be careful what you fish for
When does cloud become fog
Envelopment is universal. Interconnection is particular and common.
The Chicken Shack of Parma
I have a superficial resemblance to myself
Institute a universal standard for inappropriate smiling
Let the form do it
The Case of the Particular Common
“Twelve elephants couldn’t have moved it.” Said Lt. Jason O’Connor, NYC Court Officer and witness to the collapse of a 565-foot crane in Lower Manhattan. O’Connor had tried, without success, to lift the section that had trapped a man in his car. [NY Daily News, 2/6/16, p. 6.
“’The incident occurred literally as they were lowering the crane to secure it,’ Mayor di Blasio noted.” [ibid, p. 5]
Literally, figuratively, metaphorically, de facto, de jure…
Au practique, mon amour
Do a thousand cranes always bring good luck?
Trappt in the unpresent
Regrownbone
I’m alright Jacques
Every year pilgrims in large numbers circumlocute the big black box in Mecca
Youth on the prow, pleasure at the helm
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth.
Writ Coleridge, a moment before Instagram
Mysteries, magicians and mountebanks.
The latter from late 16th c. Italian montembanco, from the imperative monta al banco! an allusion to the raised platform used to make an impromptu stage.
It is a mistake to imagine that one’s intentions or ambitions are coextensive with the natural order of things.
Initially, such an assumption can produce what appears to be success, since its force is highly concentrated, and may, initially have been intuitive and opportunistic. But it is easy to see why it, or any other concretized position, conception or overbalanced driving toward a goal becomes, in an often-invisible moment, the agent of its own reversal.
A Catalog of Hateful Places
A very long litany indeed.
Or, conversely, as John Clare evoked, one may discover unto one’s self:
A language that is ever green
That feelings unto all impart,
As hawthorn blossoms, soon as seen,
Give May to every heart.
As England’s language flower’d and fruited, it destroyed, by ripping into and out of place, its own “nature.”
Irony? Or something other?
“Country,” as a word, derives from contra (against, opposite) and its original sense alluded to land spread out over against the observer. By the 1400s, it came to mean a tract or region and of a land or nation. By Tindale’s time (1526), country is contrasted with city: “Tolde it in the cyte and in the countre” (Mark V, 14).
Oh, what a beautiful country…
Twelve gates from the city, hallelu!
Joshua fit the battle of Jericho.
But one size fits all.
In the countre or the cyte where the unifomiversal fails, lo the common thrives
