One-third of Zorro

The slash is well named. It is brutal punctuation.

too young to be spry

"Pert" is one of those adjectives best avoided that are, all the same, just so much fun.

imagine

What if there were a Fred Rogers for middle age?

the varieties of prayer

A friend invited me to his baptism last week, which was held in the small, trendy pool of an upscale, design-conscious midtown hotel (congruously named Grace Hotel).  The pool was in a humid room planked in reclaimed wood, with art projected onto the ceiling. 

There were about twenty candidates for baptism, five pastors to counsel, immerse and pray over them, a many-versed hymn accompanied by guitar, and a short sermon on the meaning of baptism and on the old scene by the River Jordan that could have been delivered by a country lay preacher in the 1800s - though this pastor spoke from the notes on his iPad. 

All were in swim shorts and tshirts, street clothes.  One young man, his green hipster t-shirt had an oversized print of a cassette tape on the front, was flowing with tears as he went down, then rose from the water radiant, crying, overcome.  Through his wet tshirt, you could see the big tattoo of a sixteenth note on his back.  Two of the congregation reached down to help him up from the water, a third dried him, reaching for a folded towel from a mismatched stack. 

There was a crowding around this corner of the pool, as each of the baptized emerged, a sense of love and desire to create and hold a feeling of some kind - one I know well from my own baptist past, though I could only watch it at this phase in my life.  They had gathered by the river.  Deep in the city, the folk will have their ways.

the varieties of prayer

When Burmese Buddhists take leave of their elders - parents, great aunts, and so forth - they kneel before them, bring hands together and touch forehead to ground, give thanks, ask forgiveness, and receive a blessing.  This is the gadaw.  A great act of mutual love, which I have again seen in my home, this morning.

fitness to purpose

Androgyny is almost as beautiful as intellegence.  And both?  Man.

like ants

One function of lawyering - shameful but real - is as a form of offensive irritant deployed by well-funded or otherwise well-supported parties.  Won't talk to us, will you?  Fine.  We'll dump a can of lawyers on you.

hooked

Village connectors: U Bein's Bridge; the Roosevelt Island Tram.

vortices

Hell is an orgy of strangers, forced to the moist immediacy of unknown, interior flesh, pressed against an itching suburban globe of pale, tufted polyester, abraded by scentless smell, hotly unwarm, clammy but sweatless: ceaseless, empty intimacy.

simply so

Life is better with a spouse at one's side.

angels

Last night we watched Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist, a lovely, fragile thing - as tender as an old man's heart.  The animation is of a water-colored style, given its corners and shapes by thin, hand-drawn lines.  And then there comes a moment so beautiful, subtle, right and startling, my jaw actually dropped and I clapped my hands.  Do not let me spoil it for you:

Our gentle protagonist is in a little boat, nearing the dock of the village where he will perform his magic act.  We see his aged back and small stack of luggage in the boat.  And then, as if the dreamlike animation were in fact there, a couple of drops of water appear on the "lens" of the "camera."  It is an entirely aesthetic moment that sends one's whole mind racing.  A chill ran through me.  I wondered how many people even noticed it - it is there for less than a second.  I look online, and of course viewers do notice it. 

The moment is the second of three feats of special visual magic that exceed even the level of great animation.  The first feat, only a little less great, is that an animation of a magician performing his stage tricks should contain no magic at all.  And yet the magic is there.  It is only the drawing of a rabbit being pulled out of an empty hat.  And yet the viewer is still startled and pleased, as if by a real illusion.  As animation itself naturally is.

The third feat is the peculiar interlocking - deliberately not quite integration - of the hand-drawn with the computer effects that appear now and then to give the ripple of water in a bay, or the dance of a match flame, or the drift of countless feathers caught by a breeze.  The hand-drawn and the computer effects set one another off.  They work together, but not as one.  The effect, again, is to create a world that is meant not to become quite real, but to be artifice: to be seen as illusion.

water drop

One thinks of the wealth of detail - of data - that exists within a few moments in Dallas.  Movements, microphones, cameras, people, campaign politics, weather, civic arrangements, anatomy, emotion, dictaphone belts, school books, lenses, motorcycles, pavement, freeway intersections, mowed grass on a knoll, sunglasses, neckties, necks, chrome - on and on.  And as teeming a whole exists - but unexamined - in every collection of human moments, anywhere.  One really could write a book: Six Seconds in Your Kitchen: 12:30:00 to 12:30:06pm, Friday, November 22, 2013.

coming home

Why not marriages of more than two?  (Not as a matter of law or society, but simply as a matter of private good.)  Chiefly, I think, because the love of one other can be unconditional - and can be unwavering - in a way that a love of more than one cannot.  Because comparisons between two are inevitable, and there is something lovely and needful in present love of the incomparable.  And only one may be both incomparable and present.

talking in tongues

It can be difficult to convince a secular person that religious fundamentalism is attractive to many people, here and abroad.  That it is the kind of religion they like and choose.  That hardly makes it good or true - but for some reason many secular folks want more.  They want to believe that religious fundamentalism is not only wrong and harmful, but unattractive.  This despite the fact that in other aspects of life - diet, excercise, fashion, what-have you - the same phenomenon exists in more trivial forms: a significant number of us will be attracted to things that are strenuous, demanding, alienating and - in their implications - both judgmental and potentially transformative.  Cross-Fit, vegans, goths, gamers.  And in the absence of liberal education or similarly special conditions, this will rarely express itself in the mode of liberal spirituality.

overheard

Two middle-aged friends walking down the crowded sidewalk in front of me:

"my head is spinning"
"that's because you have crystals in your ear"
"but my head is always spinning"
"once you get sick you have crystals in your ear; they keep spinning"
"my brain doesn't know where I am"
"there's an EMT who can flush out the crystals, not many doctors specialize in it"
"he can't hurt me?"
"you have to trust me on this one"
"I can't eat anything"
"I couldn't walk without my hand against the wall when I had crystals"
"I can't eat kale any more"
"I know it's not convenient but you have to see him"

Then a stranger, abreast of me and hearing all this, calls out:

"Jesus! Don't listen to her!"

Good.  The voice of a modern day Samaritan.

a feature, not a bug

A church (or synagogue or mosque, etc.) rises through mainstream social strata at its peril.  Ordinary folk do not want to join a congregation that reminds them of their place.  So how may a church survive the monetary fruits of frugal, virtuous living?  By separation - by weirdness - the creation of an alternative social structure set apart from the mainstream.  For example, the Mormons or the Hasidic Jews.

shibboleth

Freedom.

next

I will try my hand at some parables, which are populated aphorisms.

wrapped in foil, oozing hot fat

The difference between a city and a large city:  A city is a concentration of order, maximal at its center, that holds back the frontier, as a sodium vapor street lamp holds back darkness.  The large city is a cavernous order of frontiers within.  At night, on the trail and in the metropolis, the smell of charcoal, the occasional orange spark curves skyward, the chow wagon and ladle, the food cart at 4am.  Skewered meats, desires, ambitions.

Hillsong

I've been to camp meetings in South Carolina, folded chairs on sawdust under a tin shed roof, and I've been to what is in fact a camp meeting in New York City, folded chairs on the sticky wood floor of a dance club, making a buck on Sunday morning by renting to the only comer.  One had shape note, the other had PowerPoint lyrics.  One was loud, the other was - louder.  Both were thin intellectually, but filled with things to think about - the depth of yearning, the felt need, the hands stretched out and up.  The people will have their churches, and ambitious religious leaders will find the shapes and notes to gather them in.

what the internet is for:

To permit me, eventually, to discover the wrestler Gorgeous George.

policy

I'm told the Chinese call Burma "the beggar with the golden bowl."  Just so.

an abstract one

To be part of any group is to be a fraction.  To be whole, one must never ultimately be a member of any group.  (Unless, in concept, that group were ultimately subordinate to one, which is to say that the other members are the only members of the group, ultimately.)  To be incidentally, or even rather deeply in groups, or paired, may of course be good and is not my concern.

a technical one

Like a lever, or any of the other simple machines of mechanics, the lien is one of the simple machines of law.  A machine because it functions upon ownership and credit, two of the fundamental substances of law.  A creditor's lien upon that owned by the debtor secures the credit.  This assembly, taken as a unit, forms a security.  Because a security may be taken as a unit, it may be traded if there is a market that permits it.  This, of course, is true both in the abstract and in fact.  Securities, in their variety, multitude, combination and contexts, are the subject of much legal work.

Bankruptcy law concerns itself with the orderly resolution of unsecured credit.  This orderliness is the substitute for security.  All bankruptcy lawyers - and all good securities lawyers - are bilingual and can deal with the complex mixtures of secured and unsecured credit (including that logically necessary hybrid known as undersecured credit).  Yet the two modes are deeply different: secured lending is mechanized at its root.  Unsecured credit in its fundamentals involves no legal machine. 

They are as different as a cord of wood and a wooden wheel.

a modest one

The philanthropist's hand falls from the book half-read, head droops, and a half-dreamt, half-thought ogre reappears: that a painless plague that afflicted a random nine-tenth of the world with infertility, and the rest with the inability to have more than a couple of children, then disappeared after a generation, leaving the children normal, only to reappear every thousand years or so, yet unpredictably, might be a greater kindness than any good heart or head might do.  The philanthropist's reawakens, shudders, and turns the page.

eve

An evil, once boring, has nothing to commend it.  Goodness endures even its bouts of dullness.

photo essay

 

NYT: Obama’s Portable Zone of Secrecy (Some Assembly Required)

I request the cone of silence!

Each would appear to be open on the bottom.

why can't we have nice things?

Chiefly due to having other nice things.  The Beijing Olympic Stadium - the Bird's Nest - apparently cost half a billion dollars.  Even if it actually cost twice that, this is approximately the cost of a single underground corridor at the new World Trade Center in New York.  Surely wages and benefits, cleaner air and such account for much of this.

money and merit

One reason it is so difficult for people to think clearly about the relationship of money to merit is that the relationship clearly exists among small, adjacent differences (though imperfectly and subject to corruption), but hardly exists among big, distant differences (though occasionally).

For example, it is false to the point of offensiveness to think that the difference between peoples with high average incomes (say, the Swiss), and those with low average incomes (say, Cambodians), is merit.  Or that the difference between an American with average income and an American amongst the 100 wealthiest is merit.  Not so.  Across these gulfs of difference, merit and wealth hardly correlate.

But merit and wealth (or cost) do correlate reasonably well within small, adjacent groups of difference - that is, within a market.  The more expensive law firm in a given city is not always better, but is a better bet, absent more information.  The more expensive stenographers in a given city are probably better than those who are less expensive.  The more expensive can of soup of the same basic sort (presence or absence of meat, organic or conventional) on the same shelf is very probably better.

With a few sentences' development, this point is readily grasped, indeed one most of us already know.  But money is such a seductively easy, abstract quantity - such an available measuring stick - that it is a matter of constant occupation to some (and itself explains much of the market for success literature) to wonder why someone is a hundred times wealthier.  The reasons for this are unlikely to be within an individual's control.  But what such a person is far less likely to wonder about - but would benefit more from - is why a neighbor or sibling is, say, nearly twice as wealthy.  The reasons for that will usually include some items for action and improvement.

for example, St. John's

Western modernity is distinguished in part by the sheer quantity of entertainment ingested by each person, along with other matter designed for mass consumption.  It is impossible to see this as either neutral or an entire good, yet it explains much, perhaps most, of our differences with seemingly backwards people of other places and our own past.  Indeed, it goes beyond quantity - the chief quality of western entertainment is its capacity, like a powerful glue, to stick and spread.  We must be very careful to distinguish our considered mores from our cultural preferences.  This is one of many reasons why Westerners must be liberally educated: this work of self-separation.

thought experiment

I agree with Orson Welles that pornography cannot be great art.  Certainly erotic, even "pornographic" elements can belong to great art, as elements of a larger story, as a lure, as a heightening effect, or otherwise.  Just as phallic elements may be part of great Mayan architecture.  Or as illuminated tantric manuscripts may be artistically excellent.  In relation to that excellence the pornographic content is mere accident.  But leering at rutting cannot itself anchor aesthetic greatness.  I reach this conclusion more by the lack of counterexamples, but also by thinking through the capsizing effect that pornography would have on an artistic work.

I suppose if any art form could sustain greatness while being pornography - it would be dance.  One can hypothesize a ballet or other modern dance number involving actual sex.  But the problems - of dehumanization, of interruption, of capsizing - are obvious enough to reinforce rather than weaken the conclusion.

beyond Chagall, newly

Three sickle moons rise over a yellow chair.
Reeds whipped by wind beat the barns they grow beside,
A visible wind of grey chalk dust and blue,
A choking fog, dry, not cool or warm: color.

And only color, that cakes the fur of cats,
The slinking cats, each low to the ground to breathe,
Not choke in chalk, not cake their lungs by gasps
Of blue-grey wind that drives them to shuttered barns.

They squint for a gap, their noses to the ground,
Wanting some way inside, or under floor boards,
They crawl behind the bases of flogging reeds,
Circling the barn foundations, ever moonslit.

Chagall, newly

Three sickle moons rise over a fallen yellow chair.

gut feeling

To lack success is felt to be socially naked, as the destitute are naked.

yuck

To smoke a cigar is somewhat pleasant.  To have smoked a cigar is not.  One carries a dry, cottony mouth of bad flavors for hours.  Which is exactly what one would expect from putting a wad of smoking leaves in one's mouth.

olympia

This morning's early subway ride was a poem of happenstance, all perfectly true:

1) Propped against a wall, sitting on the sidewalk, a woman, maybe 40, still pretty, dirty.  Drunk, with her malt liquor can in a paper bag.  I pass and she cries out, as if burning: You are an imbecile.

2) I step down into the subway station, and a Sikh, maybe 30, looking dazed, mutters at me then loses interest.  As I pass, his eyes turn to the clock overhead and he says, mechanically and softly, as if recalling a truth: It is 3:52.

3) Waiting for the train.  Construction workers climb up from the tracks, about eight of them, a Whitman's Sampler of manhood.  They gripe, joke, and call out to their co-worker on the opposite platform.  The thick-necked guy with the earring is laughing loud, square-bodied and cocksure.  A just-smaller fellow orbits him without realizing it.  The older foreman's face has started to turn jowly, but he is still in his prime, is given deference, stands just apart.  And the miscellaneous men, actually looking miscellaneous, not quite belonging, waiting to go home.

4) The Sikh has walked over to them.  He says, in an unsteady shout: Can I ask you a question?  His tone is so unnatural, his loudness so out of range, that they take him for crazy and laugh at him nervously, but somehow not offensively.  The Sikh sits on the bench they'd gathered around.  He leaves them alone; they leave him alone.  Somehow he seems the bird and they seem the tree.

5) The tree protects the bird.  The bird quiets the tree.

6) The train comes, creeping in.  Construction.  An empty car except for one couple, walled in by their luggage, wrapped heavily in tape marked Аэрофлот: Russians.  She is fat but beautiful.  Cheeks like small apples, and a pink complexion.  And he?  Leni Riefenstahl would have cast him, and given him an undressed, sporting role.  His elegant frame is just strong enough, and his face structure handsomely implies brutal capacities.  But the blondness, as I focus in, is bleach.  And his nervous eyes tell all, as he turns to her.  She, not he, is their strength.

7)  I arrive at my station and step to the escalator.  I pass the small lady in a Muslim veil of cream-colored cotton and feel her tense.  She is afraid of me, the passing presence behind, and in my mind I think to her: peace.

aday

Life must be more than waiting to die.

motive

It is nearly death to be truthful regarding the salience of luck.

up

In fact the city does sleep.

Carousel of Progress

• palimpsests
• blackboards
• transparency films
• display screens

palimpsest

The online headline is "Saudi Man Beats Servant."  One imagines the headline "Man Beats Servant" running continuously, from the beginning of the human race to now, not as mere fact, but as the endless, creeping flow of pitch that  bin d s    o  u  r    c  i  v   i   l   i    z    a    t    i    o    n.

Disneylandia

Disneyland is, fundamentally, a vitrine.

yule log

Even within the tribe, the dances are kitschy, as Christmas is to the Christian.

the way we never were

Reading a biography of Disney, it is remarkable how the golden ages - of turn-of-century America, or of his studio - never occur except in the imagination, but there occur strongly.

The actual struggle of America or of Disney to rise directly transitions to the disillusionment of power and structure.  There is no intervening golden plateau in time.  But there is a golden plateau in imagination - the hopes of youth and the security of experience drawn together onto a mental plane, a central clearing, that becomes a permanent, though unreal, stage for the enactment of what never was.

When I was an undergraduate, my writing style came from a deliberate effort to complement - even match - the material being written about.  (This was made easier by the fact that I was writing mainly about written material.)  And the style also grew from an attempt to present things in an order of natural development: each section would be presented when it was done brewing, no sooner or later.  My idea was to create nothing - only to give new and fertile ground to the material and let what grew - grow.

Disney had something of that approach to America: it was a cultural rather than artistic relationship.  And that is the sense in which Disney is authentic.  To watch a "Silly Symphony" is to watch a tribe of 1930s Americans watching their nimblest members perform a new ritual dance (sound animation) in a new clearing (the cinema) to whole tribe's satisfaction.  To visit Disneyland is to visit a tribal festival, enacted by a 1950s American tribe, for itself.  (Unlike a World's Fair, which is nominally for others: the "public".)

The Disney festival is, for example, supremely commercial because the 1950s American tribe is so.  It has a fantasy-driven relation to the outside world because that is what the tribe has.  It idealizes Main Street because that is what the tribe does.  The satisfactions and embarrassments derive largely from that cultural correspondence:

Disney gave the American tribe many of its ritual dances and costumes.  They evoke a time that wasn't, but an imagination that is peculiarly true to the tribe and thus quite unlike the fantasy worlds of loftier and more literary artists.

a simple one

You have enough.  You already had enough.  You are going to have enough.

each of us

I have no special love for Koyaanisqatsi or Naqoyqatsi, but Powaqqatsi is a glory.  Out of the masses, the eyes betray personality.  Individuality is not a social construct.

sleepless

Thinking of Hegel: Your actions are your soul. Your thoughts and motives - your feelings and memories - are real and relevant, but only in the same manner as your body. You are deepest not within yourself but at your very edge - in contact with and in motion within the world.

fur

Honesty is naked, but that will never do.

aloft

I look down on the tops of sunlit, densely white clouds.  The wind carves patterns into the tops of these clouds precisely like Gobi desert sand dunes.  What we are looking at, when we see these clouds, dunes - or deep ocean waves - is not moisture, sand or water, but wind.

kit house

As Sears and Montgomery Ward helped us move West, Amazon helps us move online.

pipe tobacco

Smells are the glue of memory.

massive

There is a silent majority, in the sense that the majority is silent, and must ever be so.  The ordinary virtue is the virtue of refraining.

Westgate Mall

My mind reels in disgust at violent evil, and knows that, in reeling, it forms part of evil's invitation.

because it makes them less alone

One who turns the pages of old philosophers shouldn't wonder that dogs stop at every corner to smell for the piss of those who came before.

King Walt

Will to power through sweetness.  Just imagine creating something you will name "Main Street, U.S.A."

The Long Goodbye

A beach is a kind of temple, as courthouses and hospitals are temples, at we come in contact with power.

glories

Beryl Reid's portrayals of Connie Sachs in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People.  Nobody has so threaded the needle of laughter with a string of tears, or so given us the bathos of intelligence unharnessed and put to pasture, the bow unstrung.

36°30′

A test of an American's historical literacy: can that person connect our Civil War to our relations with Latin America?

Pelosi, McConnell

Power is derived from the governed, but the governed are not themselves powerful.  The people project their need for the powerful onto whom they choose (though they often do not admit they chose).  Then some, only some, of those chosen, show the capacity to reflect and shape that power back onto the people.  Those are the powerful, and their power takes many shapes.  Some are powerful without being obvious, like McConnell or Pelosi, others are old-school, dick-swinging mensch like LBJ or Robert Moses.  On the contemporary political stage, Merkel is the prime example of this old-school, untrammeled version of power - good, bad and indifferent.

big city

It's a big city. We have a store Specializing in Stretch Fabric.

prompted by appellate brief writing

Triangles work uniquely well as metaphors and to structure arguments because it is easy for the reader to grasp that there are exactly three straight paths from the triangle's three points.  Tell readers that there are three things - animal, vegetable and mineral, say - and they readily grasp that there are three relationships: animal to vegetable, animal to mineral and vegetable to mineral.  This clicks with the reader.  It occupies the sweet spot between simplicity and complexity that gives a satisfying intellectual click.  Tell the reader there are four or more points, and the relationships fall apart in the mind.  No click.  Tell the reader there are only two points, and there is no intellectual satisfaction: it all seems too easy, simplistic.  Again, no click.  This does not mean points may come only in threes.  But it does mean that there has to be an underlying order when there are more than three points:  Four to seven points along a straight line - each leading to the next, each building upon the last - can be satisfying.  And it is always possible to collect miscellaneous points summarily and separately, leaving the main points organized in some satisfying configuration, untroubled by the small fry.

reader

Every departure is a book of small leavings.  The climactic exit comes only towards the end.  But eventually the cover shuts as certainly as it had opened, with that startling realization that the game is afoot.

Auda ibu Tayi

You tell me what is honorable, and I'll tell you where you belong.

an interpretation

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Taken in context, this is a scripture about taking things a step at a time and not troubling ourselves today with what will be trouble tomorrow - a compound exhortation to savvy sequencing and childlike blitheness. Neither is very deep nor at all original, and each is a crude aid to the simple. Valuable for what they are, though, and appropriate to the audience hearing the sermon.

But the single observation is also intelligible in isolation, and deeper. Taken apart, I understand this scripture thus:

• As admonition: Brethren, add no evil.
• As observation: Our labors are hard enough even when we work timely and well.  So do not add yesterday's troubles to this day's by procrastination.
• As theory: The presence of evil is a natural result of material entropy and human disagreement.
• As encouragement: Evil is but one aspect of our time - it neither overtakes nor is the whole - it will press but not break us.

hum

Short sleep, caffeine soup, the thud
of papers served "Official Business"
And what to do with them.
Mile markers of pages typed,
Hot blue sky of baked thought.

Back home a nettled comfort,
Domestic kiss,
The dust of mutual imperfections settles
Thinly but there -
The need for constant cleaning
Of what moral entropy flakes
From two scalps.

This is good, this somewhat garden,
This oxidizing happiness;
At 35 I am not flattened,
But I am not shiny now.

Our love is a 2004 Honda Accord.
A nice love, a reliable love, a well-equipped love.
It gets us around, it doesn't let us down,
It is better than our friends' cars.
They ask us about car maintenance,
And we are good shade tree mechanics,
Generous with advice and hand tools.
We keep our mats vacuumed
And the oil changed.
Our cloth seats are fine:
Don't leather seats burn in the summer?

Fancy things make us nervous anyhow,
We'd feel obliged to slip-cover our hearts.
The honest wear, the pucker in the driver's seat back,
says this is yours.

And, we have good friends.
I have a lot of ands,
But not enough sleep.

When I get 8 hours in,
I slumber past the thrum of ands.
But when I don't,
I am terribly awake
And the particles,
The small words,
The twitchings of minor muscles,
Swarm over me and - there!
Conspire to be apparition.
With frosty whisper of
a long, middle passage.

Episode 13

Of Night Vale. The one where they figure themselves out. 

Jonathan Edwards

Congregationalism.  Constitution.  West.  Emancipation.  WWII.  Hubble.  I believe in America.

long love

Love grows long and then anything can remind you.  A pasta sauce seems a little like him in attitude, a tree smells a little like him, you detect little shards of him anywhere.  The mystics must have been like this in their later years of adoration.

bad puns

Apparantly there's a Congressman named David Camp.  I hope he becomes president.

comme les autres

Politically or socially, the shutdown is analogous to a national strike.  A small - but not that small - bloc of the public puts its foot down and says no.  The Tea Party, French farmers, Welsh coal miners.  Their values differ, they may all be doomed to fade, eventually, they all do collateral damage - similarities and differences.  But, fundamentally, an American variation on a national strike of the sort that roils other democratic societies.

a six-course life

Il faut laisser du temps au temps: You have to give time time. - François Mitterrand

inward travel

Perhaps mental objects relate to thought and memory precisely as physical objects relate to acceleration and space.

Or, if you prefer:
[With respect to mental objects]
memory : space :: thought : acceleration

we age

I look at my old writing, a decade old.  How I deteriorate.

Astoria now

A warm night that smelled like an easy, suburban Christmas of pot roast and Duraflame.

Liebnitz

A zero fell to pieces and made the world.

very regular

Zero, One, Two, Infinity.

pot culture

There was a half-smoked joint on the floor of my office elevator just now.  I kicked it into the gap between the elevator floor and the 42nd floor landing.  Maybe a rat will eat it.

yeah, yeah

The French have their si.  The contradicting yes.  (Of course it is also used for emphasis, but all emphasis is implicit contradiction.)  For lack of a si, we English speakers are forced into the use of no or any of its negative kin as a kind of whole-word prefix to an affirmation: No, I'm going.  Or else we made the affirmation bigger: Oh, yes!  Or we do without.

one line plays

Didn't you call last night?  Well, somebody didn't.

quick

An unstrung bow soon becomes naught but a strange stick.

waiting for something

The answer is to stop asking. 

an obscure one

"Remember: Gatorade is basically soda, so give them water, and maybe orange slices, when they play."

assembly

Like each other great city, New York looks big, but is much bigger than it looks.  Across from my law firm is a public school building that houses an elementary school in the lower floors and a high school in the upper floors, about ten stories in all.  They are conducting a fire drill on the sidewalks.  A sea of children - about three thousand in all, I'd guess - organized into tight rectangles managed by teachers, each with a red binder.  I can see them out the window, sunlit and looking like confetti in their bright, juvenile clothing.  The short youngsters towards East 57th Street and the lanky teenagers on East 56th.  The motorcades to the U.N. General Assembly pass in the orange-coned special lane, heads of state with their entourages, yet another layer to this phyllo dough city.

Luxembourg

If there is no benevolent deity, patience is not a cardinal virtue, but only a tactic - though very often a good one.

glories

Horses' gaits.

glories

Sutton Foster singing at Café Carlyle.  Sitting there, happy and in love, his hand touching mine under the linen tablecloth as we near a decade, murals aglow behind Sutton, her eyes locked with mine as she purrs.  The pianist, really accompanying - setting off long low vowels with slightly staccato notes, pulling back altogether for her riffs.  The quiet a capella duet with her musical friend who is married tomorrow.  The lovely wine, the wide open smiles of prosperous men, dined and wined, then drunk on her performance.  Waves of understanding: so this is what Woody Allen was getting at, what the Upper East Side has going for it, what this organ of New York's cultural viscera is doing.  A pearl of song in an expensive casket; its lid lifted an hour each evening.  Will we be back?  Perhaps when old, when seventy, to remember last night.  It will still be there.

school is in

It is 7 am.  My N train pulls into the 59th and Lex subway station.  There, at the foot of the down escalator, a mother glares up the descending steps, draws down into a half squat - I suppose to improve her view up the escalator - and, sounding like a drill sargeant, yells "Hustle! Hustle! Hustle! Come! On! Hustle!"  She punctuates each echoing word with a big, meaty clap of her hands.  I exit to the sight of two bleary-eyed pre-teens half sleepwalking, half running, down the moving steps to catch the train, backpacks tugging heavily behind their downward gait.

hymn

Nothing sings quite like need, especially for deliverance.

Carousel of Progress

If I could reintroduce one happy fiction to American thought, it would be a sort of futurism or utopianism.  We did better with those dreams than we are doing without them.

greek key

A certain amount of illusion is called for in the construction of anything that depends in any serious way on the regard of others.  To present a naked form invites contempt or, worse, misapprehension.  Even a paper cup is printed with some sort of design.  This is more than decoration.  It makes the thing more there.

a mean one

It's unkind of me, but there are some people who should not be walking down the street toting 2(x)ist and Victoria's Secret shopping bags.  The mental images are unfortunate.

zippo

Eventually, the threads of a screw strip out and the screw's head is tapped out from too much rough turning.  Ruined, irreparable.  We all feel like that busted screw sometimes.  We feel that way precisely because we are not made of steel - we feel and are flesh and blood.  And that is our rescue: we heal.  Our threads come back into neat alignment and our heads return to the ready unless we mistake ourselves and our substance.

vicera

Everything is messy inside.  That's why foreign policy isn't done in glass houses.  (Except lately?)

wasting time

If I were a snitch, man!
Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum.
All day long I'd tattle with delight
If I were a stealthy man!
I'd never play the face card.
Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum.
All day long I'd weasel and play dumb.
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
If I were a subtle-sliding snitch,
Sly ol', shifty-eyed ol' little man.
...

spaghetti squash

Most of my dreams repeat, but last night's dream was new.  I'm in the apartment, sometimes in the living room, other times in the kitchen, later in bed.  It is daytime.  Every few minutes, I notice a new gap or wide cut in my body.  Each is painless and bloodless and I do not notice them until I see them with my eyes or feel them with my fingers.  I feel no fear, only curiosity at their great depth.  Each cut goes almost through to the other side.  One cut is on the pad of my thumb, and goes clear through to the thumbnail: I can see its inner surface, backlit like pale stained glass by the sunlight coming through my bedroom window.  Another cut is to my thigh, another to my side, just below my ribcage.  There was no blood, no pain, no muscles, bones or organs.  Instead, there was only an excellent view of stringy, pale, slightly translucent flesh that was precisely like that of spaghetti squash!  I am certain that spaghetti squash is the object whose memory was used to paint these wounds in my mind's eye.  (We ate a lot of this and other varieties of squash growing up.)  The picture above nails it, right down to the slight glow of light through the thin, scraped out part of the squash.  It is rare that I can show, with good accuracy, a scene from a dream, but the picture above is very nearly what my thumb looked like (except that there was no fork, and nothing spilling out).  Awake, all of this seems gross, but in the dream it did not seem so.  Instead, there was just a sense of curiosity satisfied - so that's what I look like inside - and curiosity not satisfied - where are these gashes and cuts coming from?  My brothers and sisters will find it amusing that, after so much reluctant eating of squash as children, one of us eventually dreams that he really is made of the stuff.

above and below

The obvious is overcome,
Is made foundational,
Built on, and lost.

For example,
We worshipped the sun once,
When needs were plain as light, warmth, food.

But we think, we are more than needs,
We aggrandize, we sell:
Sun King, Sunkist^©.

Somehow, briefly,
These cloud the sun itself,
So that I say: "There is the sun."

And probably you ask yourself:
"What's his reference, What's the
Antecedent?"

But I'm pointing
To that orb in the sky
That is not harvest, nor king, nor

Lawrence of Arabia's sun,
roasting Gasim, nor the
Homeric dawn,

Nor the solar,
Capital-S Sun that
Anchors our massive galaxy.

We thought our way to those objects.
Instead, the arcing sun,
that hot circle

of light above,
Glimpsed momentarily,
Then tabernacled with reasons.

hate

Sitting in a hospital to look after someone else, my healthy body hangs heavy and awkward.

The feeling of our bodies as constant threats, as ever-present sources of ruin, like sleeping with a coiled cobra. The feeling that, while healthy, our bodies are gaudy, showy things - that I am as indecent and vulgar walking around this ward in a healthy body as I would be to wear an actual crown.

And then the queasy sense that it might be the other way round - that the physical self is the master and keeper rather than the kept: that my body has me at gunpoint - kidnapped!  That our bodies keep our souls as playthings, as whores, to be kept until tiresome - and then my body will kill me.

Nightmares. Awful and imbalanced thoughts.

Perhaps I should be in hospitals more, around death and misery more often. Then I would sit through a hospital night, sleep in a vinyl padded chair unperturbed, and not see old women wheeled past, not smell the morbidity, not hear the machines beeping, the patients moan. I would just think about the work I brought with me.

Was there ever so wondrous and humane a thing, so necessary and good, that was yet so hateful and disorienting, as a hospital? Those intense cross-currents and resources of moral and physical force are what make a hospital, like a courthouse or a prison or a military base . . . a real temple: the house and ministers of something to be reckoned with.

stepping out

A favorite - on the sidewalk or at work - are older ladies whose clothes are fussy, old-fashioned, but put together.  Church ladies, older secretaries, daytime museumgoers.  Stiff bows, jewel-tone synthetic structured jackets, undyed wool in loose weaves, patent leather flats.  But more, the carriage and expression of the ladies themselves.  Poised, ready, unhurried but going somewhere, soft and sure.  They and the world have worked out an understanding, and neither crosses the other.

now

To hide is vice.  But once lit bright, what will show?

glories

Legos are a fine example of how something extraordinary may be made to seem simple, even obvious.  Legos are to toys as Mark Twain is to tall tales: unsurpassed.  The blocks are a marvel of geometry, their interlocking, exact proportions are a joy to think through and graph out.  Their manufacture is precise, and of just the right formula of plastic: from a single material is achieved the correct function, form and color, with durability.  This is a beautiful achievement: there are no gaskets, coatings or paint.  That, only the right plastic could manage, an example of synthetic material that is the opposite of cheap.  The right form and the right material give Legos their wonderful snap/unsnap quality, which is satisfying to feel and hear, giving a sensation of creative construction backed by soundness.  A construction of Legos, unlike blocks, holds fast.  They therefore invite engrossment: a sustained investment of a child's playful effort.  Their play value is unsurpassed. 

There is nothing showy about a bucket of Legos, but everything worthy.  Naturally many of the themes and sets and so on devolve to ordinary toy silliness, but I can think of no better toy than a big bucket of ordinary Lego bricks.  Det bedste er ikke for godt.