CL

 

It’s all Timur’s fault…

And he just makes lame excuses

 

Shrouded in the hysts of mistery

 

There once was a loris named Boris

The heppist hep cat in the forest

“It’s true I go slow,

But that’s cool ‘cause you know

I’ll still be here swinging tomorrow.”

 

Subduing the Crazy Monkey, Catching the Restless Horse.

         These are terms used in Ba Gua Zhang and other internal cultivation forms to describe the process by which one calms the heart and emotions so they do not jump uncontrollably (like a monkey), and, over time learns to refrain from the kinds of rumination and overthinking that can unsettle the mind (like a skittish horse).

 

Times lede: “Three more officers were wounded in the attack, which left many wondering whether anger at the police had prompted yet another shooting.”

Which prose left at least one reader puzzling over whether was it the wounding of additional officers that “left many wondering,” or the attack itself? And, of course, the significance of the ubiquitous, yet elusive “many.”

 

Mickey went out to play poker with Goofy, Donald and Uncle Scrooge, which left Minnie wondering…

 

Lay on, MacDuck!

 

But we do know that Minnie, Minnie was not in the least tickled…

 

Political systems can neither free people nor enslave them. As is evident in the resistance, resilience, and breadth of mind of some people in authoritarian societies and conversely in the mental subjugation of many people in nominally “democratic” ones. Even shorn of hypocrisy, political systems can only facilitate or discourage the production of free people and slaves, they are not determinative.

This is for the simple reason that what we call freedom and enslavement are, at bottom, internal states, and they develop and reside within the individual in relation both to the external environment and the individual’s inherent nature.

If you engage a process of figuring out who you are, and come to terms with your internal structure, that is a path toward both freedom, and reality. Discovering, accepting and grounding oneself in one’s internal reality could be called a precondition to all other “freedoms,” though clearly these potentials may not be encouraged by the political structure in which one lives. In fact, no matter how “free” a political structure proclaims itself, it tends to be hostile to the autonomous, internally cultivated individual, since people like this see external systems of authority for what they are, and nothing more. Even if they don’t actively dissent, they tend not to invest in the status quo. In short, they may obey authority as a practical matter, but they don’t find it necessary to “drink the Kool-Aid” in order to do so.

 

Uh, which one of the several elephants (moldering) in the (living) room do you want to not acknowledge first?

 

An apocryphal account of a spring 1886 meeting in Washington Square Park between Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain. Stevenson, visiting New York and having learned that Twain – who he admired but had never met – lived on lower 5th Avenue, set off from his hotel in hopes of finding Twain in the park. Which he did, whereupon they reportedly sat together on a bench beneath an elm in rapt conversation from morning till mid-afternoon. So enlivened was Stevenson by this encounter that his doctor, who he visited the next day, reported to Mrs. Stevenson that her husband “seemed like another man.”

 

A bacon saved is a bacon earned

 

The things they parried

 

Yinstagram

Yinternet

Yintern(ment) (camp)

 

White Crane meets Black Swan

 

Crouching

Pouncing

Ouch!

 

Tyger Tyger…

 

Diasporides: the scattered philosopher

 

Keep calm and carrion

Carry on…

The road to…

“good” intentions

“bad” intentions

“ugly” intentions

Once upon a time in the W(r)est

 

LOL: leaving out labor

The manor house built itself

The table polished itself

The bread baked itself

The wheat threshed itself

The bomb assembled itself

The clock willed its hands to motion

Carry on luggaging…

 

All the graphic representations you saw – in the Times, Daily News, Post, Guardian – of the trajectory of the white truck down the Promenade des Angles in Nice showed its course as perfectly straight. Linear. Geometric. Many of the accounts in English used the word “plowed” as the descriptive verb.

Eyewitnesses, however, reported, and videos confirmed, that the lorry veered-was steered from side to side, its path resembling a kind of land-based wave form. Or something snake-like, perhaps a dragon’s tail. Certainly, dragon’s teeth were sown in its wake.

That one finds misreporting, misrepresentation, misinformation is hardly worth remarking. It is rather how events are distorted in the show and tell of things that give access to the thought systems underpinning the signs displayed and deployed. These distortions are categorical in nature, and often show a pattern that does not reveal itself in the drama of the event, but instead finds expression in the way the event is represented. There is, as Euclid is supposed to have said to Ptolemy, no royal road to Geometry. Much less a Roman one.

 

Dire straights

 

So much re, and so little ap or com-prehension

 

The seventh cataract of the Nile is on the Rhine near Mainz

 

 

Holy Roman Empire, Batman!

 

EX OMNI OLLAM, PVLLVM

 

Uh, that chicken’s got a certain (Smith and) Wessonality…

 

The ballad or the pullet?

 

A curious thing how in our world a person may praised and rewarded for rehashing a bunch of empty clichés, while another will be reviled, even prosecuted, for plagiarizing them.

 

We are the dogs to which It is going

 

It is true that water seeks lower ground. How does it flow-go there?

It is true that water evaporates and disperses. How does it evaporate and disperse?

 

A century ago as of this writing the Western Front was hardly quiet. Much of Europe’s energy was locked in a battle of unprecedented human and material destruction near the River Somme in France. The industrialized West, no longer sending its soldiers into combat “heroically” nude, q.v. David’s Leonidas at the Hot Gates, had thus come round to the exact antithesis of the swift and decisive clash of phalanxes that had characterized the Greek ideal of war. In the U.S. next year’s doughboys were still mowing hay down on the farm, having not yet imagined, much less seen, Paree.

And today, the battlefield is frontless, backless, sideless, sleeveless, topless as the towers of Ilium, or rather formless, cloudlike, and could appear anywhere at any moment before instantaneously transforming into the flank or rear or empty space.

Everything is diffuse: a drone-fired Hellfire missile vaporizes the celebrants at a Pakistani wedding party. And even the classic IED injury, getting your “bell rung,” refrains from blowing the brains out, but instead maintains the bony integrity of the skull while opening up countless microscopic vacuua in the soft tissue within. All nano and mist-like until a truck driven by a real man, as if triggered by the feux d’artifice themselves, roars along a promenade and material in a zero sum clash of hard against soft, and the impact, even the very idea of impact, recalls to us something dimly remembered from long ago.

All Quiet On the Western Beachfront…

 

…And at night they gather round me, and I tell them of my roaming


In the Country of the Crepuscule beside the Frozen Sea,


Where the musk-ox runs unchallenged, and the cariboo goes homing;


And they sit like little children, just as quiet as can be:


Men of every crime and colour, how they harken unto me!

            And I tell them of the Furland, of the tumpline and the paddle,


Of secret rivers loitering, that no one will explore;


And I tell them of the ranges, of the pack-strap and the saddle,


And they fill their pipes in silence, and their eyes beseech for more;


While above the star-shells fizzle and the high explosives roar.

            And I tell of lakes fish-haunted, where the big bull moose are calling,


And forests still as sepulchers with never trail or track;


And valleys packed with purple gloom, and mountain peaks appalling,


And I tell them of my cabin on the shore at Fond du Lac;


And I find myself a-thinking: Sure I wish that I was back.

            So I brag of bear and beaver while the batteries are roaring,


And the fellows on the firing steps are blazing at the foe;


And I yarn of fur and feather when the ‘marmites’ are a-soaring,

And they listen to my stories, seven ‘poilus’ in a row,


Seven lean and lousy ‘poilus’ with their cigarettes aglow.

            And I tell them when it’s over how I’ll hike for Athabaska;

And those seven greasy ‘poilus’ they are crazy to go too.


And I’ll give the wife the pickle-tub I promised, and I’ll ask her


The price of mink and marten, and the run of cariboo,


And I’ll get my traps in order, and I’ll start to work anew.

         For I’ve had my fill of fighting, and I’ve seen a nation scattered,


And an army swung to slaughter, and a river red with gore,


And a city all a-smoulder, and… as if it really mattered,


For the lake is yonder dreaming, and my cabin/s on the shore;


And the dogs are leaping madly, and the wife is singing gladly,


And I’ll rest in Athabaska, and I’ll leave it nevermore.

[from Robert W. Service, “The Man From Athabaska,” Rhymes of a Red Cross Man]

 

Live and loin

 

Somme enchanted evening?

Methinks not, Starshell