Krsna Govardhana

He lifted the mountain, that the cowherds might be sheltered from divine storm.  The Mosaic cleft of the rock, turned horizontal.  I ask my spouse and guide to such things and he says, no, it was to protect the Buddha.  The divine in the cleft of the rock.  The tale travels and tumbles and turns, but the mountain remains aloft and the cleft, holds.

before a live audience

The poor reception put a layer of static atop the layers of bubbles and cathode ray screen and Lawrence Welk.  And her insomniac stupor - the only reason she'd turned the old set on - added another remove to the thickest layer of all: she, not quite fourteen, born in the year 2000, had never heard of, heard, or seen Lawrence Welk till that moment.  But as his baton flicked and bounced, as his smile held fixed, and his hair shone while the polka played right through the static of years, she was filled with desire.

steeple substitute

love : love :: want : wonder

want : wonder :: desire : faith

desire : faith :: sexuality : religion

sexuality : religion :: practice : practice

Sakurov

Oil paintings look, at their surface, like the wet cobblestones in Singing in the Rain.

Ark

There I was, in Annapolis, in the newly renovated Robing Room of what was the library, until we moved it, and had become the Barr-Buchanan Center.  My little boom box, where I contrasted the opening bars of the St. John's with the St. John's Passion of Bach, and I thought to myself: the Hermitage in St. Petersburg is, somehow, the center of the world.

not a peep

Peeps® say it all.  They are the best of America; they are the worst of America.  Artifice that could hardly be more real.  Tasty but empty.  They are, on balance: very good.  (I'm talking about classic chick Peeps, especially yellow ones.  Varietal Peeps are evil and hasten the End Times.)

The classic chick Peeps, of course, come as quintuplets: seated, if you will, in a row of five.  The two aisle-seat Peeps always seem a little bourgeoisie, self satisfied, and privileged, one bloated wing sprawled comfortably.  They are the 1%.  (The 40%?)  The three middle-seat Peeps seem a little sad and wingless, with their mallow on both sides eventually exposed, sticky and visceral. 

But of course, when the cellophane comes off and the carnage begins, it's the fat birds on the aisles that get decapitated first.

blue-plate special

Some mornings, the sun rises sunny-side up.  A milky yellow oval in a puddle of white clouds.

Plato

"The earth when viewed from above is said to look like those balls covered with twelve pieces of leather and divided into various colors, of which the colors seen here are like samples, such as painters use.  But there the whole earth is of such colors, and they are much brighter and purer than the ones here."

more Winkie

Who will not answer to the rudder must answer to the rock.  Be not bound down, upward bound be.  If the gods do not answer, be answerable to their possibility.

Nonsense?  Probably.  But such as towards which I would not want to be entirely insensible.

lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass

On Monday, by Fifty-First and Park, pale palm fronds covered the drainage grate by the sidewalk; cool, clear water from an open fire hydrant pooled above; warm morning sun spangled the wet, pale mass; and a tumbling flow from the drainpipe below echoed up to the treading commuters' ears.

The Seducer's Diary

Marriage blocks the dangerous paths that lead to it.

Pythagoras in stitches

I think an edition of Euclid, especially Byrne's Euclid, belongs on every quilter's bookshelf.

as human as families

The bankruptcy clause in our Constitution is a distant echo of Aventine secession, of Roman forebears, of the Decemvirs.  It, like they, know debt as a fundamental human question. 

Have you seen my appeal? I left it laying around here somewhere.

Men, far more often than women, pass in their late middle age through a short phase of looking goofy.  No longer youthfully desirable, not yet leonine and distinguished, they look for a time like they lost their keys, especially in family pictures.

naming rights

Money, like water, flows, but only because of great, abiding effort.  Gravity pulls the river down, in mighty constancy.  Money, too, flows only when there is some great pull.  Like gravity, that something is often as constant and mighty as desire, or vanity, or love.

ringside

A whiff of quackery clings to many necessary, reformative programs.  They fought their way to us, through the crowd, and remain in it.  They jostle against and sweat with the common mass of seedy proposals.  Show me an idea whose hair is in place, whose sleeves are clean, whose glib, soapbox explanation for its hard truth is not yet pat, and I will show you an idea whose time has not yet come or whose station is yet unmanned.

feathering

A great ninteenth-century Dutch painting (for example), is not just a matter of art, but of tech.

shoulder pads

It takes a little conviction - or the serious entertaining of the needfulness of conviction - to do good in the world.

Scott Buchanan

"When in doubt, be gentle."

what is truth

Among we humans, a fully abstract thought is true only in a very narrow sense (though often useful and sometimes internally true, as with mathematical systems).  And the truth of entirely concrete facts (including outright opinions, whose limitation is precisely that they are merely facts about those individuals who hold them) is true only in the flat sense of is.  The truths that give fullness to that word - truth - and thereby deserve the title, are revelatory, ambulatory.  Or both, which is to say, functional.  Truth threshes facts, letting the wind of abstraction carry away the chaff.

Reason active in the world is the source of such truths.  Reason in a vacuum; the thoughtless world: alike barren.

George and Mary Everest Boole

Do you know what else is sexy?  True stories about surviving spouses who take up the mantle of their late spouse's intellectual work, carrying faithfully forward, finishing the chapter, holding the theoretical fort.

budding

Spring in the city is sexy - the bulky coats are left at home, and we fill the sidewalks with our own, shapelier selves.