XCI
Be then now
More or less than meets the oy
Sit spot: that place close to one’s lair, or even in one’s lair where, for an hour every day, one sits, simply to be still, and within this stillness to feel, on one’s skin and in one’s bones and everywhere in between, the patterns of the natural. And one’s embeddedness in them. [Jon Young, via Tom Bisio, “Post Standing (Zhan Zhuang),” privately published article, 2015]
An older shade of dude
When oblong isn’t oblong enuf
The pig in the man-pie hat
Do not paint feathers on that which is not a bird
Bitcoin, not to be confused with the town of Bitburg.
The former represents a heightened level of monetary fungibility, the latter, well…
The name Bitburg, it is said, derives from the Celtic toponym Beda, a goddess worshipped by the Gauls. Beda, together with Boudihillia, formed a dyad, Alaisiagae, believed to represent, the cyclic aspects of, respectively, righteous battle and burial. One translation of Alaisiagae is “dispatching (or dispersing) terrors.”
Bitburg’s history goes back aways, to around what is now the year One, originating, it seems, as a stopover on the trade route between Lyon and Cologne. The town, once part of Roman Empire, became part of Franconia, then fell under the aegis of Luxembourg, then greater Burgundy, then the oxymoronic, yet real, Spanish Netherlands, followed by the equally improbable Austrian Netherlands, then France which ceded it, and its region, to Prussia in 1815. Now part of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate, Bitburg is located about fifty kilometers from the city of Luxembourg and is home to an American Air Force base. In short, Beda-Bitburg went around the block a bunch of times while staying in the same place.
So…?
So, Hitler built a barracks there when he came to power, giving Bitburg sufficient strategic importance for American aerial bombardment to render the town a “dead city” – in official military parlance. After the war came the complementary phase of the Alaisiagaen dyad: the German military cemetery in which, among several thousand Wehrmacht soldiers, some forty-nine Waffen-SS are interred.
Wouldn’t it be a bright idea, then, for Helmut Kohl, chancellor of the peacetime GRD, and Ronald Reagan, leader of the free world, to stage a reconciliation between former deadly adversaries (dovetailing, or, more accurately, hawktailing, with the fortieth anniversary of V-E day and a nearby G7 summit) at said cemetery, and there celebrate West Germany’s willingness to serve as a launching pad for American nuclear war-headed Pershing II missiles aimed at the Evil Empire? I mean, forty years – their boys, our boys, all good boys…
“Controversy,” often heated, attended the plan, and the ceremony and then, well, the caravan moved on, whether from Lyon to Cologne, or Cologne to Lyon, who can say? With the result that today it is possible, at Trader Joe’s in poshest Chelsea, on the cusp of the Flatiron District, to buy Bitburger Beer by the can or four-pack. And to feel, even in blossoming spring rain, the terrors disperse, and innocence falling all around, like snow.
“Bitte,” as the slogan runs, “ein Bit.”
Déclaration Universelle des Droits de l’Arbre.
Frigitarian = someone who eats what’s in the fridge
Frigidarian = someone who eats the dairy products in the fridge
Miracle of the lobes and fissures
Yang sheng, a common, everyday expression, “to feed one’s life”…
Great oaks, they say, from tiny acorns grow. But what of the infantrees?
The English Elm at the northwest corner of Washington Square Park – from which it is said a redcoat spy was hung – is my (yet standing) Donar Oak.
Disorientalism and its incontents
And, of course, your sit spot could be wherever you sit
She (a writer): The worst thing is to be a writer.
You: Not really. The worst thing is to be whatever you think is the worst thing to be.
Fifty tints of gaze
At what point does the thousand yard stare go clinical?
Moi, toi, quoi?
Kua?
I shall admonish Paris with a…
Woodman spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I’ll protect it now…
My heart-strings round thee cling
Close as they bark, old friend!
Here shall the wild-bird sing
And still thy branches bend.
Old tree! the storm still brave!
And, woodman, leave the spot;
While I’ve a hand to save,
Thy axe shall harm it not.
Writ George Pope Morris, oncet
Ah, but George, he is no woodman. Rather a metalman.
Metal generates water and controls wood
Wood generates fire and controls earth
Earth generates metal, and controls water
Water generates wood and controls fire
Fire generates earth and controls metal
Which generates water…
Wherefore, ye who wouldst bring metal to wood, beware
The paper of record. For what is record, in this case but wretched: insult to injury – to intelligence, to language, to humanity and all things sentient and alive:
Headline: do the workers also search for victims amid the non-pockets?
¶ 2: “inferno”? As in Hell?
¶ 3: “A police officer lead [?!] a dog around the edge of the piles.” True, the past is never simple. Or past.
¶ 4: “…crane teeth on brick…” At last report neither cranes nor cranes possessed teeth, though the hook end of a crane arm may be fitted with a toothed excavator bucket. “…And a police helicopter pounded the air.”
¶ 7: “City officials said the likelihood of finding survivors diminished with each hour.” Or as they say in BK: No shit, Sherlock.
And the prose spirals upward and outward, like but not like a toxic dust devil: pounding and compounding in the widening gyre, while below in the ninth circle’s depths sit the “lady’s” gray eminences, like and not like the fates, ever selecting, naturally or no, the survival of the fittest to print.
Kilgore: Smell that? You smell that?
Lance: What?
Kilgore: Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that.
[kneels]
[John Milius]
The well-strung soul
Food was flyin’ everywhere
I left without my hat.
[Zimmerman]
There is no middle age, just as there is no middle class. Only pivots.
And my lands, what a lot of energy it takes to see the world as linear.
But as James Osterberg once sang: That’s just hypnotizing chickens.
