conflation

In my mind's eye, reading Shakespeare, most characters are definite in their costume, hair, movement, but obscure in the face.  Falstaff is an exception; he is simply and always Rembrandt's middle self-portraits, dressed English.  No actor can shift my inner eye's conviction that he - is he.

watched

We, like water in the kettle, are alive between first heat and full boil.  Active waiting is life.  The purpose of heaven is now.

Mr. Dryden

Don't do something, just stand there.  It's a quip, but does seem to be a viable formula for success - once you're well stationed.

tortoises and hares and roadrunner

Through the mezzanine and up the subway stairs to work: a knot of commuters, smack into the slow, two abreast, overweight backsides of a couple, struggling with each step, blocking the way.  We silently sigh, and pack in behind them.  The commuter abreast of me, a fellow of my age, dress and build, more visibly impatient than the rest of us. Step. ... Step. ... Step ... 

And finally out.  We stride around them into the open dragway of the sidewalk.  To work!  Except the impatient fellow, who dashes just into the street, against traffic, to pass all of us.  Smack into a delivery boy's bike, front wheel passing between the commuter's legs, his forehead and the biker's nearly knocking, wire basket into his chest, taking the wind out of him.  He wilts, gasps, and limps back onto the sidewalk, trouser seam torn.  Nothing serious, though, for him or the biker.  And we all registered the lesson.

stapled

It is quite strange to look at a signed contract, or a will and testament, or a lump of gold, or a live stock certificate, and think what it - the object - is doing to be of value.  Or being.  But the strangeness itself is stranger.  For what these objects are doing - holding value to terms - stapling - is comprehensible only in society.  Our society.  And it is as our social selves that we are least strangers to ourselves: best seen to ourselves. 

We will pay to hear a tune, but know nothing of the chords or technology of transmission.  We only want the tune, and others, who want the value at our disposal, bend to provide it.  Everything has something of money in it, at least potentially.  That, of itself, is not sad.  Realizing the money inherent in many things is deeply sad, of course.  To sell one's own or another's intimate body or soul is sad.  Living a money-driven life is sad.  To sell one's dexterity or voice is potentially sad, but in our culture, not immediately so, and more often a happy, daily transaction.

So what are these objects - gold, contracts, negotiable instruments - doing?  These things that can make us sing?  The modern legal category-name for stock certificates - negotiable instruments - and the beautifully suggestive term ancient term will give the decisive clue.  They are being the thing that takes two steps, and are doing the step. 

The first step is to be present for what we - not just those directly involved, but the society in general - say the thing will be.  The second step is to make it harder for us to change what we said at the time the next human action.  The object abides between the two steps and in abiding connects them by limiting the second step to the first.  That is why these objects bear marks of validation - seals, signatures, hallmarks, legal opinions. 

They are staples.  They restrict the subsequent step to the prior, they persevere against change over time, but only relative to the affixed parts: that is, only so long as the broader society holds to the two steps.  Gold is not valuable if the society that makes it so altered - it simply feels that way because there is a kind of social sameness that connects us and ancient Babylon, and that aspect of society is persistent about the fact of precious metal value.  But how we think of that fact changes greatly, and so gold is far more malleable in its conception, as well as its substance, than a worded contract.  The Magna Carta, or the charter of the Hudson Bay Company are, in that sense, far more persistent.

up front

So give me a man with the touch of feminan,
And a woman that glints with man,
Like the glint of a fret
Pressed to wire plucked to sing
The song of a semiquaver subway smile
Cross the face of a man that's just man,
Or a woman that's so again, but was then
More than, wavering, not uncertain,
But vibrato metal note
Dropped into an open mouth of ash
That had been and will be silent,
But now voices the glinting touch.

5:15

Silence echoes inner stillness, as echoes tell of inner motion.  To be in repose, or becalmed, is a dangerous state.

Without salt, is there taste in the white of an egg?

Doing biases telling.  Wanting biases telling.  But entire disinterestedness obscures telling.  What is most telling is almost wholly disinterested, but with a motivating tincture of activity and need.  The judge abench: removed and still but not inert.

a plain one

Howard Marks, a financier, says that his success is a matter of being "aggressive, timely and skilled."  For someone in a relatively uncorrupt commercial space, whose activities are too numerous to be a matter of luck, good or bad, I think that's about right.

Will you hence, before the tag return?

There are, of course, King James only hashtags. #CompleteInThee is one from Bob Jones University. 

marauders

Among broad, old, elastic social labels, it is remarkable that conservative and liberal do have and retain some meaningful relationship to the non-social meanings of the verbs to conserve and to free/be free.  And we should not expect conservative behavior of those with nothing to lose and nothing to be freed from.

citified

The profit motive, of itself, is hardly in need of explanation.  It begins with need, then security, then comfort and pleasure, and finally branches into more idiosyncratic satisfactions, of seemingly ratified competence, or of ego, or power.  What is harder to explain is the participation of one person in another's profit.

powerless

Too much realism is a debility.  There is reason behind assigning truth telling to the fool, the aged, and the captive.  As the idle soldier leans on his rifle, so the mere truth teller admits a want of other use for words.

decade

Marriage is lengthy, attraction is short.
The transition is love, and then – what then?
It’s you and me, garrisoned in our fort.
To lie in bed or rise as two wise men.

For wisdom forges raw love, anneals it,
Sharpens it, weds it to oaken handles
Fit for daily use, gives it edge and grit,
Fills the armory, readied for battles.

And too the garden shed is ranged with tools,
Two plows, two hoes, the too hard soil to break.
Wisdom and love, tough and steady as yoked mules,
Yield us bread, where mere love gave only cake.

Love, that will not rise from bed, is soon past.
But afield, farm or battle, it will last.

big of you

Parked near work is a locksmith's panel van, sides painted with contact information, service details, and this: POP A LOCK SERVICE FREE FOR LOCKED IN CHILD.

fortune cookie

Blending in is blended out.

doesn't know it

The graffiti at my subway station reads: Im sexie and I know it.

stickers

Coming up to my office this morning, I see a little patch of stickers - maybe five of them - stuck to the wall of the elevator.  Fruit stickers - the labels stuck onto apples to help the cashier.  Someone has used the time riding up to peel them off fruit and deposit them onto the elevator's paneling.

This, of course, is bad.

And other things are bad.  Police brutality, ISIS, dementia, greed.  But is there any useful or even meaningful commonality to these things?  Aren't they tied together merely by being susceptible to being labeled bad?

And if that is all, what good are labels like bad?

The answer is in the mediation of such words between our thinking and our thoughts.  The broad, vague categories like bad are part of the flex of our thinking life.  Like the categories left and right, or conjunctions such as and and or, they are as indispensable and provisional as our ability to hold things in our palms for a time.  Are those buildings on my right, and those trees on my left?  Certainly.  Is it useful to be able to think them so?  Yes.  What do those buildings or trees have in common?  Only that they are susceptible to being noted as to my right or left on account of my position.  Outside my thinking, there is nothing right or left about those buildings or trees.  Does that empty such categories of use?  No, they are necessary.  They are part of my ability to move myself through thoughts, and move thoughts around.

Broad categories are the hands and feet of thought. 

When someone tells you something is bad, or when you hear yourself think with some such broad category, the question is chiefly: what is being done with the thought?  It is the motion of the doing and not the flexibility of the tool that tells.

commercial law

It is delicious to see greedy, difficult economic actors beggared by their own overreaching.  To see them do wrong and lose.  We whose clients were modest and fair laugh and clap at their deserved losses.

long middle hours

We have been together so long that our conversations reach subjects like the ranking of nations by frequency and speed of postcard delivery.