CLII

 

Virgin goddess – what parthenonsense!

 

I’ll see your Hamilton and raise you a Tubman…

 

Tails (and heads) of the discontinuous looneyverse

 

Virgin Mother: a parthenonsequitur

 

Why bother with an individual candidate when, with a slight modification of existing laws, one could nominate, and potentially elect a corporation president, say, Goldman Sachs? Eliminate the middle(wo)man!

 

Loonyversal suffrage!

 

Disparately seeking sophrosyne

         Just as long as the agon is sufficiently anodyne

 

The Dream Chapters

 

What kind of harvest can you expect when a whole culture is Roundup Ready®?

 

Another move toward bringing language into conformance with the world as it actually operates would entail the use of the personal pronouns he and she when referring to corporations and other institutions that function, for all intents and purposes as superpowerful individuals. The application of gender to organizations, as an exercise in taxonomy – fraught as it might be with complexities – could be very useful toward more accurately identifying and describing the true nature of our social dynamic…

 

And now it’s time to play What’s My Propensity?!

 

So, about that statue of Athena, the gigantic one, nearly forty feet tall, and sculpted by Phidias in 430-something BCE – the one wearing a peplos made from a ton’s worth of gold plates and g*d knows how much ivory for her skin, the one Pausanias describes in detail two hundred years later down to the serpent coiled round the inside of her shield, a Gorgon’s head on her aegis, helmet crowned with flying horses, stags and deer, rampant griffins on the ear plates – you know that one, couldn’t miss it, standing in the naos of the Parthenon, holding a spear two heads taller than herself and leaning on a column topped by a winged Nike.

So I’m sorry to be, like, from Missouri on this one, but, hey, this totally awesome statue just vanishes without a trace? Poof! Like really? Like what if it was, you know, the same deal as Helen being kidnapped to Troy… maybe? Or, like, surprise! Pearl Harbor, with most of the fleet out to sea. Or the stars and stripes flapping on the moon where there’s, like, no wind.

I mean who would want to climb all the way up to the Acropolis and go through all this purification ritual and votive offerings and hassle to get into the center of the temple and come out saying, like, dude, it’s empty in there!

 

Well I’ll be a wounded Amazon!

 

Nature’s fine with vacua. It’s stories that can’t tolerate ‘em.

 

I mean, the Greeks are famous for their myths, right?

 

As far back as I can remember, I’ve had a visceral solidarity with others’ distress, confusion and disorganized energy. Mother’s milk. Daddy’s knee. If what’s in the disposition is resounded by the outside world, the conjoining feels powerful and all-encompassing. What fires together, wires together, so it’s said.

How then, to engage with others’ energies without getting locked to them, or frozen into an internal isolation to avoid risky interactions?

To date, I have no answer. But I have experienced that it is as possible to teach myself new patterns, as it is fruitless to demand that the outside world conform to my desires.

How to establish an emotional dynamic that corresponds to one’s balance in the shifting spatialities we encounter and negotiate externally: this curb, that uneven pavement, an escalator, that door: does it push, pull, swing, or revolve? Ducking under that oncoming umbrella. Step back to drive the corner-cutting Uber away.

How to be centered without being stuck. Rooted, yet mobile.

Again, no answers, only techniques. And of these, only two: breathing and walking: the reciprocal and controlled shifting of the body’s weight from one leg to the other, and the internal alchemy of air. The arms swinging opposite, the diaphragm dropping to allow the intake and pushing gently upward to allow liberate new space – all of this done without thought, the breathing part involuntary yet mind-mediated, without fixation and in conformity with a rhythm that is at once sounded and resounded, inner and outer, a constant turning, as though one’s body were the world itself, a thousand worlds taken in and exhaled on every breath.

 

It’s not a real arm without a tat on it.

It’s not a real tongue without a stud through it.

It’s not a real vein without a spike in it.

Without the tat, the arm won’t flex.

No stud, the tongue can’t taste.

No stick, the blood don’t flow.

 

If God gives you night, make nightmares

 

 

They could have taught us breathing. If they’d known how. But they didn’t so they taught us what they knew: sine, cosine, tangent; squat thrusts, the American Revolution. Behind their backs we made paper airplanes. Out there, beyond the school gates, the factory printed boarding passes, assembled metal planes and rolled out another runway at Da Nang.

 

How to learn not what you’re taught, but from what you’re taught?

 

Tokyo Rose, Galloping Gertie and Rosie the Rivetrix walk into a bar…

 

Ausperity is just around the corner…

 

And besides reading, writing and math, we learned the Three Harms, which being ubiquitous, we scarcely needed to be taught:

Holding the breath or forced breathing

Labored use of muscular strength

Throwing out the chest and sucking in the abdomen

 

Do I initiate, or does it initiate?

 

And now it’s time to play What’s My Tendency? – the game of patterns, where contestants vie to recognize movements before they become visible actions…

 

Stand and deliver!

Well, uh, it’s not so easy to reach my liver. So, how about a kidney instead?

 

Sharp practice makes Jack a dull boy.

And depletes his heart-mind through over externalization.

Jill too.

 

Are poison plants botanic-kills?

 

Welcome to the new S&M social media site: KinkedIn®

Login or Join?

 

When one is young, hangups can be crippling. When you’re middle aged or older, they’re almost surely fatal

 

Loose livers send shivers

 

Allons enfants de la Patrie, la crise de foie est arrivé!

 

Kalashnakovsky: Russian composer famous for his extended staccato passages

 

Geodesic Joan

 

And the little gray parrot cocks his head and squawks: Pallets of cash, pallets of cash!

 

Pausanias made it all up. Never left Lydia. Why bother when you can imagine what the world, and future worlds, will want imagined?

 

May the best liar win!

 

Algorithm: who could ask for anything more?

 

Does your browser ruminate?

 

One taciturn deserves another

 

What is the relation between conformity and uniformity?

 

Holy fuck, dude, I got a dog pregnant!

[This is where the story could end – leaving the reader to imagine (or not) a continuation of the implied dialogue. That said, some will choose to read on.]

Uh, that’s like, uh, genetically impossible, dude.

No man, sure as shit, they tested the DNA and, like, it’s my…

Fuck man, you’re bullshitting me –

No dude for real, I swear –

OK motherfucker, if that’s true it can mean only one thing…

Yeah, like what?

That, dude, you’re not a dude.

Huh! Well I ain’t no chick, that’s for fuckin’ sure!

No asshole, you’re not a chick, you’re a dick! A doggy dick.

[pause]

Whoa. Wow. Whew. Give me a minute… whoa, man, that’s heavy.

Yeah, but it would explain a lot.

Like what?

Oh man, don’t go there.

OK. OK. So what do I do now?

Well, dude, wake up and smell the kibble…

 

There’s eight million naked hustles in the storied city

 

Digital technology is both addictive and code-dependent

 

What about corruption isn’t corruption?

 

The kids aren’t alright. Why should they be?

 

Lee Harvey Roswell

 

¡Hola Cristobal!

Or statue thereof. “Birth of the New World” it is called, a 600-ton, 360-foot bronze and steel assemblage depicting Columbus at the helm against a backdrop of billowing sails is, at this writing, planted in and ascending above Puerto Rico even as the island “sinks” into a $72 billion-deep ocean of debt.

Fabricated in 2, 750 bronze pieces back in ’91 to commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of El Cólon’s arrival, “Birth…” a work by the Russian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, was offered to and declined by New York, Miami, Baltimore, Fort Lauderdale and Columbus, OH.

Eventually, in 1999, Puerto Rico pumped the $2.5 million needed to transport him/it out of its public treasury, and after an uncertain voyage, the sculpture made landfall within (metaphorically) stone-skipping distance from Hispaniola. Once ashore, however, The Navigator still faced difficulties. Several towns vied for his presence only to lose it. In the case of Cataño, near San Juan, the immense height of the Santa Maria’s mainmast was deemed a threat to international air traffic.

Finally, kismet, if that is the word.

“Chris Kong” as he is popularly known, will make Arecibo, a town on the north cost, his Caribbean home. Pan American Grain Manufacturing, a maker of pre-mixed cocktails and resort developer now plays the role of Isabella. At this writing he is being installed as the centerpiece of what the corporation describes as a “seaside party venue.”

 

…es un monstruo grande y pisa fuerte

toda la pobre inocencia de la gente.

– Léon Gieco

 

Correlation doth not causality make

Unless, that is, one has a concern for the causal

Otherwise, correlation will get along just fine without ever having to be something

 

Still to be determined…

 

Determined to be still…

 

Fearful = social

 

An aircraft carrier can be a very handy tool, especially when trouble flares up far from a friendly military base. This the first sentence of “What in the World: Whose Carrier Rivals the U.S. Navy’s?” in the NYT, 8/10/16, p. 3.

 

One cannot be just a little bit robot

 

Broken premises