CXLIV

 

I’m just sayin’…

You’re just sane? You mean, like, barely sane? Yeah, me too…

 

Shemporium: a store designed with the fourth, and ugliest, of the Stooges in mind

 

Ah Bartleby, ah strategy:

A preference for using the indirect or unconventional approach does not mean it can be used exclusively. Qi [unorthodox tactics] and Zheng [orthodox tactics] are interdependent and rely upon each other. As Edward Luttwack points out, when he compares what he calls Relational Maneuver (essentially Qi) with Attrition Warfare (essentially Zheng), the avoidance of the enemy’s strength and the potential for surprise that occurs in Relational Maneuver creates the possibilities of results that are disproportionately large in relation to the resources applied. Attrition Warfare, on the other hand, virtually guarantees results in proportion to strength expended and resources applied.

In Relational Maneuver, if one cannot achieve surprise and apply strength against the opponent’s weak points, one is bound to fail and may fail quite spectacularly… [By comparison} Attrition Warfare…has a high cost but a lower risk factor. Additionally, a high level of skill is required in employing Relational Maneuver tactics.

Therefore, although Chinese strategists appear to have a preference for the unconventional, there is a tacit recognition that the conventional and the unconventional are two sides of a coin that no only operate as extensions of each other, but can transform into each other. If an unconventional operation is expected and one instead does something conventional, that catches the opponent by surprise, then what was normally Zheng in effect becomes Qi. [From Tom Bisio, Beyond the Battleground: Classic Strategies from the Yijing and Baguazhang for Managing Crisis Situations. Berkeley, CA: Blue Snake Books, 2016, p. 8. Bisio is referencing Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (revised edition) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 113-115]

 

Image manipulation software for Hobbits: FrodoShop®

 

Let one hundred spools of thought contend

 

And iPhone® doth make narcissists of us all

 

Pink Panther Party

 

Rearranging icebergs in the Atlantic

 

Epithets of Venus. Yes, epithet, as in “something added, attributed or assumed.” But also ways in which she is imagined-constructed. These include, but are by no means limited to: Venus Libertina (“Venus the Freedwoman’), which may semantically run together libertina (as “a free woman”) and lubentina (one meaning of which is “pleasurable” or “passionate”). A variant, Venus Libentia, links her to a Roman goddess of funerals and undertakers.

Venus Obsequens (“Indulgent Venus”), an epithet used in the dedication of her first Roman temple in 295 BC. Purportedly sited on the Aventine Hill and Circus Maximus, the temple’s role was bound up in the Vinalia Rustica wine harvest festival, and it was supposed to have been funded by fines imposed on women found guilty of adultery.

Venus Cloacina (“Venus the Water Filter”), a fusion of Venus with the Etruscan water goddess Cloacina, who had an ancient shrine above outlet of the Cloaca Maxima, a stream converted by the Romans into their principle sewer. The shrine contained a statue of Venus and likely witnessed the performance of rites intended to detoxify the water. Pliny the Elder, for whom Venus was a goddess of union and reconciliation, cites the shrine as the meeting place where warring Romans and Sabines, carrying branches of myrtle, met to make peace.

Venus Physica: the goddess incarnating a universal, natural creative force that suffuses the physical world.

And then, Venus Kallipygios, worshipped in Syracuse, (legendary birthplace of Archimedes and his eponymous screw), as Venus of the Sublime Boo-tay, literally “beautiful buttocks.” Ah, Sicily!

A Roman statue of the 1st century BC, purportedly based on an earlier Greek bronze, shows her as she raises her skirt above her waist, looks backward over her shoulder and, seemingly, admires what she sees below.

Any connection of Kallipygos to Gallipoli or Galapagos? Sure, why not?

Such a pose is termed Anásyrma, quite literally upskirt, a gesture which displays the female genitals. It is speculated, in a scholarly sort of way, that Anásyrma was used as an apotropaic tactic, designed to shock an enemy, and by doing so, ward off evil. Another use of the gesture is as one of mockery, as in “kiss my ass,” though the surprise evoked may lead to a release of tension, and move the confrontation toward laughter and, according to one source, “a letting go of sadness.” The basis of the power of anásyrma is the “numinous quality of the female genitals and the genital region through which birth ensues.” In several cultures, ritual anásyrma is practiced to promote “emotional healing.” [Dexter, Miriam Robbins, and Victor H. Mair, Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010]

Though now and again, surprise gates onto surprise…

 

 

Prevail and salvage

 

In a meadow near Schenectady, you stand in Zhan Zhuang – also known as post or stake or tree standing – a meditation-qi gong. The woods at your back. Canticle of birds. One bird, persistent, and with a hint of sawtooth to his call cuts above the rest. Transphonated into English, it sounds like He’s got A-D-D… He’s got A-D-D… By turns mocking, sympathetic and descriptive.

 

Down by the pond among frogs. Just to your left, a glint of sun reflecting off the water like a like a little beacon pulsing as his, or her, throat fills and empties. You count eighteen breaths to one of yours.

 

We nest in stories and they protect us from the elements. Sometimes the roof blows off, or the walls disintegrate with our without the help of a big bad wolf. Build a new one when, inevitably, the structure fails. It’s OK to salvage bits of the old one. Yours or theirs.

 

Let a hundred foolish thoughts contend and a thousand follies bloom

 

Proposal for a children’s book: The Compassionate Little Clock

 

A woman wearing a teeshirt with writing on it zooms by, and as ever, your eye flies to grasp the message. I KISSED THE KAISER.

Surely not.

 

Compliance doth make cartoons of us all

 

Jockamo fit de battle ob Jesterco, Jesterco…

 

Erotometaphysiks, Skizziks

 

The “richer” the technology, the more impoverished the discourse

 

And remember to always remember the 3 Ks: Komplicity, Kollusion, Kompliance

 

Is your heart well housed?

Chinese internal arts practitioners seek to cultivate a relatively full abdomen (dantian) and relatively empty chest as represented respectively by the Water (kidney) and Fire (heart) trigrams. Toward this end, they have devised two statements, which serve as a kind of mnemonic couplet:

1) Solid (substantial; full) abdomen, unimpeded chest (Shi Fu Chang Xiong)

2) Contain the chest (like something held in one’s mouth) Han Xiong Ba Bei).

 

Of Meisen men: very pretty, fine, white and nicely glazed. But fragile.

 

Hearts will roll

 

Because they could, they did

 

Mosque-itos: tiny insects that breed in prayer rugs and bite when you face east

 

Skull and crossbows

 

Push comes to shove time at the Apollo

 

Toujours cuisse: Semper Thigh

 

those skylights

that water tower

them gables

the mostly illegible sigh

ye gardens hanging not

in babylon, nor

in captivity;

wind that blows over the café easel and skids it cross the sidewalk

burgundy turban

yellow cab

the armistice that

by invisible degrees slides

into a species of peace

a shift inside

subtle

while her dogs nose out the madeleine in the

netting of your backpack and eat it waxpaper and all

your bench neighbor asking

so… what’s numinous with you?

 

Leaves of brass

 

Manhattan kulturny: everyone wants to move into precisely the spot you’re presently occupying and you into theirs. But you want to keep your own spot too, and so do they. Flinch for an instant, shift even slightly, withdraw your armored gaze and whamo! Uprooted. On your ass on another spot someone immediately decides they need to be on.

The only way to hold any of this in abeyance is to buy it off, pay someone rent: for a café table, a subway fare guaranteeing what?, a dorm room…

And even then, someone (maybe several someones) are angling to take your spot over. Do they really want it? Do you want theirs? Perhaps not, but at least this way, you’ve found a formula for increasing your sense of existence in place by denying it to another.

 

My section is more golden than your section

 

Rationality is the chief means by which we attain madness

 

Baby, even if you winsome, you lose some now and again

Ostrogoths and gastropods always bring me down

 

The less I think, the less I am

 

Cherry pie in a can

 

Like something held in one’s mouth

 

Daze of whine and Rogaine®

 

As the wisteria said to the rosebush: I’m vine, thank you very much

 

Much “not” is simply “not yet”

 

We are an occident waiting for something to happen

 

The horns of the croissant gesture toward the circle, and sometimes in the heat of ovenly circumstances, they touch and fuse together