CXL
…using common military shorthand for ‘Taliban’ and ‘people’
…typically calibrated to pinpoint targets at relatively short distances
…only option was to rely on their own eyes
…this description could have applied to many compounds in almost any Afghan city
…rounds away, rounds away
Great patrons of the arts, the Deccan rulers of the 17th century. One anonymous work in ink, opaque watercolor and gold on paper, rendered in exquisite detail and measuring less than four by six inches depicts the Tree on the Island of Waqwaq. This tree speaks, among other things, according to the Persian version of the Alexander tale, and it warned the young conqueror of his impending fate. Though the subject was painted countless times, in this particular version, the trees branches, and the stems of surrounding vegetation terminate in a profusion of leaves and animal heads, among them rabbits, leopards, horses, elephants, jackals, deer and camels. The tree’s trunk is composed of intertwined serpents. Fish sprout from the rocks near the tree’s roots, while above, amidst the animal heads and leaves, seven tiny, bright eyed and voluptuous nude women hang from their hair, like ripe fruit.
This wonder of imagery fell into the hands a French Colonel based in Lucknow in the 18th century, who caused it to be mounted in an album with “Europeanized” rococo borders. Today, the tree, with its constituent snakes, animals and lives in the Museum für Islanische Kunst, in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
What, one wonders would it prophesy for the German chancellor – or, for that matter, any of sundry conquerors, economic, political, or military, who, like Alexander, sought its prescience? What would it say to a certain American general?
Sure, Harriet T. on the face of the new $20 bill.
But why not an engraving of the eyes of an anonymous Seminole child?
My brother and I stand like the fences
of abandoned farms, changed times
too loosely webbed against deicide homicide.
A really powerful blow
would bring us down like scarecrows.
Nature, knowing this, finding us mildly useful, indulging also
her backhanded love of freakishness
allows us to stand.
—Daniel Berrigan, c. 2000
These days, everyone’s squealing on PigStickGram®
Desperately seeking context
I’m the world’s most happy felon
When a Venetian dies, what can you do but send goldolances?
Buy beers, Mr. Shane!
Hero in. Hero out.
[Thanks, Daphne]
Squeeze firmly but gently. Udders will thank you.
Any given intentionality immediately precludes, at least momentarily, a host of other intentionalities.
Any course of action instantly annihilates an entire field of alternate courses of action, and, at least in the moment, any potential for intentionality.
Leonidas at Thermopylae
What did those Spartans hear him say?
“Vo-vo-dee-oh, Vo-vo-vo-dee-oh-doh!”
Didja hear the one about the hungry Taliban rugmaker?
Oh, you mean: eats, shoots and weaves?
There’s a deal of difference between reaching your goal and achieving your gaol.
Gaaaaaaaaaaaaol!
Is a woman (purely hypothetical, of course) who performs circumcisions on Jewish male children a femohel?
But then they all charge a fee…
And what of those circumcised African children, or children of African excision – I mean extraction? Can they be said to have been blackmohel’d?
Are these true (near) Talmudic (pace Jabès) questions, or mere circumlocuticsms?
And are trade magazines for mohels available only by circumscription?
Are Jewish Martians (little) greenmohel’d (with our without antennae)?
One sees, at a glance, how any cultural practice can gate onto endless, nearly Talmudic, complexities and shadings of interpretation.
A world of distinction to be noted between a Brit(ish) miller and a brit milah
Or Mitch Miller’s daughter Britney
Oy, mind the gap
No less than a full-frontal ontological crisis of the liver or not to be
Nerd ascending a virtual stairscape
Les demoiselles d’…
Mask out the top half of the picture…
The Dybbuck and the deep blue sea
How do you define “nothing”?
Chansons de la vide (eternelle)
It is as if the ancient Chinese and the Greeks experienced and codified the world in nearly mutually exclusive ways – to the point of non-awareness of other possible modes of knowing the same material universe.
And today, having exhausted the essential “stuff” of their cultures, their descendants grope helplessly as the ontological and even day-today structures turn to sand beneath their feet – the only question being what kind of pose to strike in one’s knee-ripped jeans while being swallowed up by an unintelligible reality.
Psychotherapy focuses its attention on the formative dynamic at work in the “family of origin.” Daoist “therapy” directs the gaze further upstream to the fusion of the parental, hence also ancestral, yin/yang dispositions that merged to form the seed of the individual at conception. This basic stuff of the self, the yuang qi, “original,” or “primal qi” is borne in the dantian for one’s lifetime, and it ramifies in one’s ongoing presence and action over the course of that lifetime as the individual inter-relates with the world.
The practices associated with nei-yeh (inward, or internal training) work to cultivate, regulate and refine this primal qi,” the constituent foundation of our individual selves, so that it can be reliably available to ourselves and others.
The full sponty
The sound of one fig leaf dropping
After another
A rising tide lifts all boats. Except those that are sunken. To see those, you need another set of conditions.
Espada de madera
Hay mano in hermano
I was a wolfish grin for the FBI
[millstone]
Straight, no chaseter
You are the bed stone
You are the runner stone
You are the peg and the pole
You are the trough filled with grain
You are the force that turns the wheel
Nourished and enlivened by the grain
By the bones of Bucephalus!
Which, legend has it, were cremated by Alexander with all the honors due a warrior, and are buried at the edge of pre-Empire India, on the border of Tibet, in present-day Kashmir, under the administration of Pakistan.
[Thanks, Daphne]
Also sprach Zapruder
Posture de l’arbre
Yi bu yi