CXXVIII
I was a bourgeois gentilhomme for the KGB
Voltage + current = exemplitude
Someone’s vanity begets another’s honest work
The cyclone: a Coney Island of the atmospheres
Alchemical subways: the D as in Dross train; E as in elixir… A for alembic.
Get on in Manhattan, get off transmuted in Brooklyn, where the girls still wear ribbons.
A measure always resembles what it measures. [Krzhizhanovsky, op. cit. p, 149]
“Hassan, give me the yardstick.”
“Which yardstick, master? The one we use for buying or the one we use for selling?”
[Preben Liebetrau, Oriental Rugs in Color. New York: Macmillan, 1962, p.42]
La pedagogia de la vida nueva
And then, again, the Lesbian ruler: made of lead, according to Aristotle, hence so flexible it could measure the exact contours of rounded stone, and all manner of irregular – dare one say non-Pythagorean? – forms.
How do you measure a dragon?
Everybody’s doing the low commotion…
The winded city
Who is Juan Rodríguez and what is his Way?
Hic sunt Neanderthalensis
An elephant heroically attempting to describe six blind men
The Mishmashmeasure of Man
How, within the great pantheon of psychedelic rock bands, does one taxonomize the Strawberry Alarm Clock? Who, in darkest 1967, counseled:
To divide this cockeyed world in two
Throw your pride to one side,
It’s the least you can do.
Beatniks and politics, nothing is new
A yardstick for lunatics, one point of view
Of rage, sing, Goddess!
Begin when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men, and brilliant Achilles –
[Fagles-ish]
Croak, Translator!
Speak, Mammary!
The elephant in the living room is you
Interesting, and perhaps instructive that there is no brand of liquid dish detergent named for Odysseus
Prospero is just around the corner
I was a hairy panic for the CIA
Betcha bosom billion dolla melancholy baby buddy
[Repeat 3x, jump down, turn around, pick a bailacotton]
Zorba, teach me to dance!
Hamlet, bifurcating, misaligns, and therefore mistakes and misapprehends the nature of being.
And some hundreds of years later, Bartleby subjoins preferring not to.
So, I lit a fire
Isn’t it good
Norwegian subjunctive
Tubby or not-tubby?
Every dieter’s question
Also asked by tubas and tubers
Diogenes, the Tubby Cynic
Egg. Cyst. End. Shawl. Quest. Shuns.
Billions may be had by setting up shop as an internut provider
I wuz a pedagogic demagogue for the UFT
Ah, Krzhizhanovsky, ah, ba gua:
If one imagines… that the continuousness of this world is not of matter but of movement (time is just that, pure movement), then the world cannot be seen as other than a system of circular motions rushing out of themselves into themselves. As in the mechanism of a clock where wheels turning wheels relay – in a certain spatial sequence, from gear tooth to gear tooth – the impulse of the mainspring, so in the mechanism of time a sequence specific to it bandies the “spinning instant” from axis to axis into the ever-receding beyond; but the axes, for all their spinning, remain where they are – in short, time is given to us all at once, whereas we peck at it one grain at a time, in split seconds. [from “Memories of the Future,” in Memories of the Future. Joanne Turnbull, trans. Op. cit., p. 150]
C.f. & q.v.: The Analogy of the Wheel
The Dao De Jing, probably the most well-known Daoist text compares the Dao to a wheel:
We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.
The spokes of the wheel of a cart turn around the hub, which remains still in the center. It keeps its position by being still and “doing nothing,” yet it is through doing nothing that the spokes can actively and harmoniously turn. Circular rotation requires a pivot, and without this unmoving pivot, the wheel will go out of balance.
Ba Gua teachers say that in walking the circle, externally there is movement and internally one is still. Rotation is the heart of Ba Gua. Some practitioners liken the whole body to the universe, in which every part is constantly rotating in relation to all the other parts, like wheels within wheels. The whole body relaxes and turns to that each part can store and release power by continuously winding and unwinding. The famous Ba Gua practitioner Cheng Ting Hua said that the practitioner rotates his body like a small screw and hub. In Ba Gua Zhang, the center of the lower back (Yao) is like the hub, the axis of the movements. The hands and feet and the rest of the body are like spokes and the curved surface of the wheel. When the body moves, the Yao and more specifically the internal area behind the center of the lower back, the Mingmen must move first. It drives and leads everything. Therefore the Mingmen is the inner point of stillness around which the rest of the body moves, just as the Dao is eternal and unchanging. As the body moves and changes, the mind and spirit stay relaxed, calm and still. [Tom Bisio, The Art of Ba Gua Zhang. New York: Internal Arts International, 2015. pp. 22-23]
And yes, one of the Ba Gua nei gongs – in which one lifts and lowers one’s head on a breath to open up the Central Channel is called golden cock pecks the rice.
If you can’t catch the six-o-nine, take the nine-o-six
Rhizome of the moon
Bouge-jitsu, the posh martial art
There are perfect storms, and perfected storms
Saved by some species of bell
A strange, Bill Murry-like man at the next table says something on the order of two thousand words to every one uttered by his female companion who restricts herself to yes, wow, and other celebratory exclamations. Despite your powers of disengagement with their noise and enmeshment in your reading, a line of his leaks over, something like: she’s trying to take away my essence.
I was an asynchronous socket error for the DWW.*
*Defenestrated Windows® of the World
The Porches look dowdy
Their futures are cloudy
So sing Audi Audi Audi
And ever buy buy
Pace, Mahalia
I SELL THE SHADOW TO SUPPORT THE SUBSTANCE
This epigram printed on portrait cards of Sojourner Truth, sold in the 1860s to finance her work as a traveling lecturer.
Ah, the twain, ever the twain
In the 1870s she was quoted in the press as saying that she “used to be sold for other people’s benefit, but now she sold herself for her own.”
Monetize
Monotonize
Monadize
The shadow knows
As does the eidolon
Defenestrate
and fly with me…
In English, the instant after you see, you saw
Vendez-vous?
I was a habeas corpus dilecti for the you-know-who
Lives of a Bengal dancer
I ♥ MY HI-STRESS® LIFE
PeopleSoft®
Reality hard
Is that so?…
I want to be an unroll model.
Or better yet, an unscroll model.
All function implies range and limitation
Furl unfurl
What’s your master narrative?
As distinct from what’s your master’s narrative?
Or, what’s your narrative, Master?
J’acuzzi!
R U an innerlectual? ;}
All around you at the café, people trying to be nice
Massa’s narrative’s in de cold cold ground…
If we’d warped a bit of the weft of it…
Or is that woof?
The Lumpen Codex
Neobiblical curse: May the Times smite you!
And lo, the Times did smite Trump for his unrighteousness, for he was a Philistine. Yet Trump raised up his shield and the blow glanced off. Whereupon he mocked them, saying: Ye are but dogs and I am wolf – how thinkest thou to smite me?
The kids who drink all the family Kool-Aid
Confederacy of blintzes
Surf’s down
Ah, the fecundity of the human imagination!
Goldilox and the joint and several bearz
Better a hedge school than a hedge fund
WOP: Weird Optical Phenomenon
BOMB: Bit of a Mixed Bag
Make resistance an internal game
