CXLVIII
Agitation of the molecules to no purpose. Migration with a cause, or not, as the case may be, but in any event lacking a generative, or even sustaining function; a kind of anti-function: people in their millions not simply uprooted by famine, war or economic hardship but because populations have become massively unrooted from land, from place, from “home.” A permanent tourism of a sort, even of the poorest, wave upon wave, Hokusai-like, with no Mt. Fuji in sight: people in their multi-millions banging around the glob(e) like lugnuts in a hubcap. Can anyone wonder that some of them scream for Borders? Can anyone wonder that the wheels wobble, that the brakes pull radically to one side and still, the vehicle, the Leviathan, the juggernaut, hurtles on.
The movements of a cyclone are violent, likewise the Dragon, but they possess an internal coherence: the Dragon coils and spirals to its limits, then reverses, the cyclone is, without forcing the point cyclic. It arises, whirls, then calms. Something is always bigger than the greatest storm and that is the balance of the earth itself. But this condition: where is its logic? Who can trace its patterns? Not merely Marx’s “all that is solid,” or Yeats’ “widening gyre,” but perhaps it is form itself, melting so softly, so shockingly, so ungovernably away.
What if we stopped needing to call it something? Or It/Something? What if we unpinned what happened, what happens, what is happening, from the hegemony of narrative? What if meaning, seeking its own level, and not our wishes, is heavier than water, and, left to its own devices, simply sinks, despite all the salt we’ve poured in and agitated to super-saturation. No longer available at the surface, if we wanted to find meaning, we would then have to visit it at the bottom of the sea. Or imagine it, since we cannot breathe there, nor withstand the pressure. Or it may be that some part of, or all of meaning, simply disperses: the harder parts concretize, the softer bits are off with the breeze that blows the dust of things, eventually, to every corner of the universe.
Plant parenthood
A world in the grip of “them”-agogues
A big dump truck sits breathing, waiting for the light to change at 9th and 21st. Cinelli Iron & Metal, the hopper reads. On the cab door “Brick by Brick.”
Banal, but undeniable: the temple (disregodded) has mostly melted back into the earth, but the vessels, lekythos, hydria, krater, kylix, kantharos are still capable of holding their own
Umbrage aplenty
Murder Inc. put out of business by Mass Murder LLC
How psychotropic was my valley
Skinny genes
Double felix
What sort of chickens would have come home to Proust?
Beauty is rhetoric, rhetoric beauty
Sez ‘oo?
Sez Mr. Chiasmus, that’s ‘oo.
“Shock and fear can lead to self-cultivation and self-examination,” writes Tom Bisio in Beyond the Battleground, in reference to the Zhen hexagram: thunder above thunder.
Vida pura loca
In Homer…it is to be read everywhere that the gods have a human body, a flesh that lances can spear, glowing red blood that flows, desires, moods, and appetites which are just like ours and to such an extent that heroes become the lovers of the goddesses and gods have children with mortals. From Mount Olympus down to us there is no abyss, they come down from it and we climb up it and if they are superior to us it is only because they are spared death. Wrote Hyppolyte Taine in Philosophie de l’Art, 1882.
As of this writing, the hundredth anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme wherein over a hundred thousand soldiers simultaneously went over the tops of their respective trenches and charged one another. No victory. Four and a half more months of fighting in the area followed, generating a million casualties, among them, fatally, one Joseph Darton, your great uncle. According to English military records he was deployed to France with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry in late 1914, killed on August 24th, 1916 at the age of 23, and buried in the London Cemetery and Extension in Longueval (grave marker 7.B.8) which is in the Somme Département of Picardie, 24 miles NW of Amiens, France.
This battle, and the war itself, has gone on historical record as a manifestation of the enmity between opposing nations. But the nations survived, and made war again, their nationalism in some way affirmed and even amplified by the conflict. Whereas socialism, the existential threat to every nation, perished on that battlefield as thousands of workers turned their guns on thousands of other workers in the name of La patrie,King and Country, Das Vaterland or some such nonsense. Not since the Somme – even in the class upheavals that attended the close of the war – has the sacred covenant of brotherhood among all common people bloomed again, though its roots still persist within billions of hearts, sometimes dormant, and occasionally, rarely, self-cultivated.
Just prior to his deployment, Joseph Darton wrote a letter from Aldershot to his brother Arthur William, your grandfather, who had emigrated to the United States: “My Dearest Arthur, Nance & All at that side of the Globe… I have just had the misfortune to knock my wrist up at the old army sport boxing but still we are all merry & bright. We are under orders to go to France on the 28th of January so we have got to keep our spirits up now or else we will not be of any use to the country. I am sorry I cannot send a [Christmas] present over for the children but you must forgive me as we do not know even when we are going to draw any money or if we draw any it is not more than 5/ & after we have paid for our washing and soap we haven’t enough to keep ourselves in fags… but still I suppose we will get over it if we will not have to get under it. I was reading in todays paper that King George has gone to the front with his army but I don’t suppose he will travel as we will have to.
I have had a bit of a promotion to Lance Corporal… the weather over hear is simply awful nothing else but rain & we are nearly flooded out, but still they say soldiers don’t care & I may tell you it is not a bit of caring as you would soon find out your masters. My young lady was very pleased to think you like the photos & she want me to be done in Soldiers uniform & send you one of them out to you…
I think this is all so in closing my letter I send my fondest love to you & all on that side.
I Remain
Your Loving Brother
Joe
Kisses for the children in the artillery shake outformation
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[p.s.] I want to ask you if I get killed to call your son Joe
Where would Brecht sit on Brexit?
Bronxit
Deus ex homine
(F)rigid
Zeitgeist busters
Trance gender express
When a killer whale “comes,” is it an orcagasm?
Put up your dukes (counts, earls, vicomtes et barons aussi)…
(R)o(r)land(o) indeed fell at Roncevaux Pass, mais tué par les Basques et non pas les musulmans
Well blow my oliphant and call me Roland!
Hey, you’d be furioso too if you’d been misrepresented like that… you might even turn florid with rage…
Sometimes, it’s just the times: vicious, venal eunuchs have the ear of the emperor, who wasn’t very bright to start with (two li shy of a mile as they say), and at court the wisest and best-intended ministers’ heads go rolling in the dust. Such literati as cling to their positions are knaves, fools and sycophants.
Time to climb up to that little pavilion in the mountains amidst the ancient pines. Loosen your garments. Write a letter to a friend on the next mountain. Watch the flower catkins whirl below, and the soar geese above. Clouds and shadows. Lone goose leaves the flock.
The sense of safety one gets from over-differientiating is illusory, and is eventually revealed as such. But more often than not, the collapse of one illusion leads to the construction of a more armored illusion – and the reflex is less toward softening distinctions, than toward hyper-differentiation.
No-stalgia, none of the time
Only slaves kill
Shekels in the city
Contend extend befriend defend expend distend reprehend forefend send lend rend end
His and her-steria
Wits-steria
Its-steria
GRAY LIVES MATTER
Absurd-ditty
Leftover dinners at Dr. Tulp’s were always a whimsical affair…
Leftover dinners Chez Tulp were unfailingly singular in their…
Dr. Tulp’s cook, Grete, took great pride in combining the most eclectic ingredients so as to stimulate her master’s palate and astonish his guests…
Though not infrequently, guests new to the good physician’s table were subsequently taken with pangs of…
Still, the after-dinner brandy gave all at table a kind of Dutch courage…
A man, Afghanistan, a plan: Dallas
Afgonistan
Rus in urbe: the countryside within the city, this phrase coined by Martial, most likely with reference to Rome, where the borderline, particularly after “the fall” but even before it, could never be distinctly drawn between the two. Something of which captivated the sensibility of the Grand Tour multitudes, who found, even close to the Coliseum, and the Forum, what James called the “luxury of landscape.” Here, on the outskirts within the inskirts rides Byron and his party. [Childe Harold, q.v. Canto IV]
Vatican or not, Square Mile or not, FiDi or not, the City is always pantheist, even “animistic” under its maquillage of bricks and marble blocks. q.v. Manetta flowing wherever beneath Washington’s Square.
The Amplitude the Exactitude the Magnitude the (Be)At(t)itude the (Veri)Similitude the Pulchritude the Longitude the Servitude the Gravitude the Gratitude the
KRONOS + MUTHOS 4-EVUH