advantageous

I am happy to hear others' problems.  But I do not want to tell my own.

pump

I remember the first time I went to Harvard, and it was by subway (locally known as the T).  The recorded voice called out the stations along the Red Line from South Station: “Downtown Crossing” where the doors open on both sides. “Park Street”, the first subway station in the US. “The next stop is: Charles/Massachusetts General Hospital.”  Suddenly we were above ground, the Charles River in view, the cupolas of Harvard's houses and schools distantly visible above the trees: we were about to cross into Cambridge, and behind, the wonderful hill over the bay that is Boston, the intellectual bastion of America, bulwark of our revolution, nursery of our best ideas.  Back underground.  “We have arrived at: Kendall/MIT.”  Closer.  “We have arrived at: Central.  The next stop is: Harvard Square.”  What a rush!  We pass the ghost station, the old Harvard station, now sealed shut, its platforms still dimly visible through the windows, then a screech as we turn a sharp corner, and the great cavern, all 1970s civic architecture, of the current Harvard Station.  The doors open, we pour out, I exit up the steps marked “To Harvard Yard.”  And there, one of the great iron gates, its inscription: “Enter To Grow In Wisdom.”  Through that gate, I could see the old Yard’s well and pump, its wooden handle there to grab and work up and down, to feel that I was there and that this Harvard, this great well, its centuries-old pump still working, was mine.  That is how Harvard greeted me.

the life of the mind is lived on the skin

The glory of Pepys diary is that the life of his mind was in the doing, the activities, the little resolutions to alter behavior, the pride of learning to use a slide rule, the function of a rabbet, the quality of tar.

ingestible, injectable television

I suppose a fair number of drug addicts get into it by way of boredom. Same as other addictions. Wonkavision. 

invertedbrate

One needn't see plants as reaching for the sun. Like moles, they burrow for food. They are at their most, down there, leaving only their branching tails sticking out, wagging upward, belching oxygen and sucking in sun, but feasting, snout down, in the moist earth.

provision

Old age is the child of the childless. 

grass

Life rides out into the prarie and is sustained, for its season, by the gradual consumption of its ration of possibility.

notes on Auden

Law is society.
Law is rule.
Law is a great piece of code.
Law is accounting.
Law is the field of play.
Law is the glove of force.
Law is the mind of power.
Law is the heart of restraint.
Law is the mountain pass.
Law is the mountain range.
Law is the railing by which we steady ourselves across the passage of time.
Law, like love, is a feeble thing that conquers all.

payment

Time is the infection.

snipers

The clouds that do not rain twist our hearts.  We sweat of them.

flash, trickle

Modern sculpture certainly has its moments: indeed, moments are mostly what modern sculpture has.  The faucet sticking out from a bronze cloud.

limits

On the one hand, excessive ambition is ugly.  On the other, it is low and unattractive to treat life as if its goal were to find a hole to crawl into.

glories

The heat wave breaks and the weather is warm, not hot, the air embracing, not sticking with humidity.  I cross streets and head to work.  There: on the sidewalk, waiting, the young couple, a sort of perfection.  He, standing, block shouldered, next to the phone booth, similar to it in tallness, dimension and form, a Latin slab of young power, seeming carved not born, gentle and content next to his wife.  She, beautiful as only a young mother, fat and short, can be beautiful, lovely as every best apple or peach would wish to be, lit by her own light, happy in the way of those unsmiling in an open privacy of maternity.  Their infant, unseen in a loose sheet, passes from her to him.  She breathes a thinking breath.  Her pink polo shirt is not tight, but her breasts are ample.  His blue polo shirt a field of sky.  The flowing sheet, of soft yellow and white, their treasure within, hardly catches the breeze, drapes between them, falling from his cradling arm like flag from its mast: a blazon of parenthood.

interstices

If there is other intelligent life, I suppose it is as likely to be here on Earth, yet unseen by us, as it is to be elsewhere.

a local one

Policy aside, Michael Bloomberg's mayorship has been a signal act of public service.

shallow

Perhaps you've seen the inverted water bottles used with cages for rabbits, hamsters, and the like. The bottle feeds a steel tube, which is sealed by a small steel ball.  The animal, licks the bearing, lifting it, and a little water flows.  Click click click is the sound as the little ball falls back into place between licks.  A little steel click click click.  That's what I hear when I click my mouse at work - the same clicking.  And really, as a I read through the news online, what's the difference?

weep

I have never been sympathetic enough.  Brokenness in others repelled me when it did not tempt me as an opportunity for advantage.  But this is mostly because I feared and loathed - and fear, and loathe - brokenness in myself.  There are substances that are weak once broken, and others that weather breakage and persevere.  God willing, we - you and I - have that persevering strength.

next, on thinking with cliches

Blank canvases invite bad painters to think - this time it will be different!

indigo

My crowded subway commute gave me a few minutes to stare at a teenage boy's tattoo, which started just below his left ear and nearly covered that side of his neck: I love you Mom and Dad.  My mind leapt to what my parent's reaction would have been.  But what of his parents?  Anything from comedy ("just don't expect us to get one of those for you, son!"), to mild gratification ("that's nice, what's on tv tonight?"), to aesthetic critique ("that flowing script is all wrong - we would have preferred black letter"), to anger ("you'll never get a job now"), to - nothing (if his parents are dead and the tattoo is in remembrance).  My own reaction, of course, was to think about it: it is stating the obvious, but a lot of instinctive behavior - these rudiments of cultural and tribal mores - is about stating the obvious in mysterious ways.  And like the markings in Revelation, this boy's tattoo is, in its way, a mystery, of the "Behold! I show you..." variety.

Kant

Maps are the best metaphors, literally.  The best maps are metaphors, metaphorically.

unenlightened self-interest

They they stand, in every rush-hour subway car, like sentries: commuters against the edges of the doors, forcing those exiting and entering to squeeze between them, single file, slowing everyone, even themseleves.  They are the totems of limited human intellegence, of the power of the lowest common denomenator of workaday, small scale, self-defeating greed.  I think of these people every day: they force their crummy little lesson upon me.  They tell me that we are greedy, stupid and boorish.

bdellium

The application of fragrance is an ancient thing.  I like to look at an ancient sculpture or Edwardian painting and imagine: she is perfumed with jasmine, or he smells of lavender, or myrrh.

provenance

That "1" and "2" marking classes on European train cars.  There they have been, and are.

thank you internet

Aha!  I was walking down the sidewalk, thinking to myself. "FTM drag queens: I bet there are."  And, of course there are.  Cool.

cay

I've slowed down - am slowing down.  Becalmed, perhaps.  I must find new wind and the right placement of sails.

sermonette

Bitterness is poison. The bitter die alone. 

El Paso

Among the snake oil salesman's greatest tricks has ever been to seat the new amongst the choir, turn, tell his own troubles, swallow the concoction himself and offer - you - the rest of the bottle.

couger talk

"Where did you find him?  Amber Alert?"

banality

At the moment, the Egyptian channel I am watching is running an endless string of commercials.  For potato chips, DVD players, baby diapers.  It is strangely terrifying.

from the kitchen table, children beside

Bach could not have written for the journey, yet he wrote to flight, by TGV, by jet. Let fields or clouds fly past the window as one hears what is baroque, as one sees what is sped up, yet calm, crowded with life and arrangement. Nature itself is baroque when passed by with attentive reality.

steel flight

Hoist points:

A mighty engine lifts

Or may be lifted.

Winglets:

A spreading wing holds firm

But more gently.

Life vests:

Secreted with their kin

Ever ready. 

Shoulders:

As real as Chicago

Hold me between.

Boeing:

Private yet national

Of me apart.

Above:

Home and Earth beneath me

While I'm soaring.

aboard, glories

Out from my seat, I see the great left wing of this triple seven, stretching at its tip upward, away from the Atlantic below. A secondary flap makes its slight movement, and we are kept level, aloft, and in good cheer, at mighty speed. My apartment would fit through the maw of either engine depending from these wings. The luxuries of the Zeppelein were not so great. Even here in economy. 

nullipara

Childlessness and the bearing of children alike carry a heavy burden of justification - seldom carried.

channels

Boston and Amsterdam. Commercial trade and highly rationalistic religious movements are the beginning and catalysts of tolerance.  The hardness of Calvinism and Puritainism eventually become the firm pavement to congregational, then democratic, then liberal belief.