contract

Surfaces and interfaces, par excellence: lungs, skin, words.

Cupertino

This child, by love, grew heavy with self
To bludgeon others, and boil under pressure.
His parents knew his power and fell to serve him;
Greased his rails and raised a locomotive
That Dreyfuss might have streamlined.

Steam built and flanges gripped.  Late they resisted,
But as pennies on the rail resist.
He flattened them into mementos of his coming upon the world.

He whistled.  A high note, shrill.  An evangelistic pitch.
John the Baptist without humility,
Not from the wilderness but through it
Like a steel stab through flesh.

The multitudes came, and he was full of bearings
That he gave to the throng like orders, like blows,
And they received his hardness like bread, like water
And worshipped him and the wounds he gave them.

Lovely stigmata, blessed touch.
As lepers they received of him.
And though it was but Hal and sham
It was more certain than they,
So that they loved and sang:
Was it not piercing?

And I say nolo contendere.
I would not lay my neck across such tracks
To have the Atcheson, Topeka and The Salome
Sling that child of chrome down the line.

more popular

Do not think about your amusements.

unpopular

The trouble most people have with truth is that it is unsatisfying.

the social gospel

Raising up the humble is appealing, particularly when linked to the casting down of the proud.  But this depends on it happening in a moment, at least in a mental moment.  As an ongoing promise, the appeal is lost - all that is left is a continual raising and lowering - an unhappy human churning, by divine agitation.

glories

Bojangles Robinson and Shirley Temple

power

Two complaints, superficially identical, may be of two distinct species.  One is a prayer, the other, a command.

across

I'd rather be my kind of fool than his.

Pearl

It isn't that she decided to tell the truth.  She simply ran out of anything else to say.

clipped

Why were coins round?  Because it is easier to see that something has been removed from a circle than from other shapes?

shorter tailoring

Law is the courtesy of power - the veil by which it avoids naked display.

narrowly tailored

Law clothes power, diverting it from violence.  Power imbues the mantle of legal words with movement and shape.  The practice of law is the provision and understanding of authoritative words for life among others' power, thus clothed, and the dressed discharge of one's own power.

Paper money, and the non-violent society required for its value, is the ultimate expression of law.

viscosity

The banker's jargon of "leverage" when speaking of debt is an apt metaphor.  Like the lever, debt is the fundamental economic machine.  And it has much of the same character - steepness, stiffness, gradualness, slip and grip - all are readily carried from metaphor to situation.  The market needs the right amount of slip and grip.  And the right range of levers within it.  One propeller works in water, another in air.  For wood, a screw is needed, unless one seeks a bit to drill.

The varieties of debt are the same and properly as varied.  But tools require discipline too - as many useful shapes as there are, useless and dangerous shapes will ever be more numerous.

red letter

Servants be patient with your masters, for this is as much your service as the laboring.  I speak of lawyers and their clients, of course.

shadows

It was Fleet Week (more precisely, the Rendez-Vous Naval de Québec) in Quebec City, and we watched a presentation on Canadian Naval history.  To an American, accustomed to highly nation-centric public history, it was startling to see that the presentation was mostly about the French, the English and the Americans - and only slightly about Canadians, as such.  Canada exists - and always has existed - in the Northern shadow of great powers, and is the better for it.  It gives a cosmopolitan spine to the sprawling, rural flesh of the nation.

Before me, Église Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, à Québec.

Within her stone walls, an inner space of wood and plaster, painted dead white, a gilded alter before.  None of this is remarkable: the tender Marie, the bleeding Christ, in their glossy painted colors.  But suspended, mid-space, a model ship, perhaps a meter long, her mast a meter high, a ship - a French colonial ship, warlike and vulnerable, an armed fetus, its Falu red keel above me like an infant spine, curling in on its viceral crew and settlers in passage.

She possesses the volume of the church.  It responds by seeming less church air than Atlantic terror made breathable transparance, centuries ago but here the way an old tomb is both then and here, the way oceans are at once ever and now.  And in a mind's moment, the walls respond and the atmosphere of the church seems not water but the ship's ethereal aura - it has held at bay the deep demons, and this is its ambit, a walled protection, a fortress of faith.  The ship has cast out death and we are safe within the stone perimeter of its colonizing fierté.  As we are dry and living, so we are catholic.

The windows of the church are not large, but small-set, as jewels - as glass carried from the old world must practically have been - and also as threats - as any opening to this cold, hard world must have seemed: practically a invitation to savage leaks, a cascade of danger that could swamp the hardy, terrified faithful below, and set the suspended model above, afloat, adrift, into the terrible, Canadian vastness.

Babylon

Cities spell effort before they speak improvement.

motion practice

Being in court is a peculiarly stressful form of happiness.