Maugre's Song

Maugre sang, plucking on a banjo:

"I'm so dumb, but yeah,

That's me.

The sky looms too large

And the ground too low.

But the accumulation of time

Like clouds, oh, thin air -

I am talking to thin air,

Peopled with a million voices.

The wind makes music in my ear,

In my year, never-ending, here on Earth."

Prolepsis

Imagine tomorrow:

And that tomorrow, imagined, will have already happened.

A mistake, many mistakes:

Once you have thought of them, you will have made them, learned from them, and moved on.

Memory works in advance:

You remember, in anticipation of tomorrow, which has already passed.

Heteronomy

Autonomy and heteronomy;

We live as we dream*, uncontrollably.

The self misfires;

The other is part of the self;

Boxed in, torn boxes, flapping in the wind boxes;

The wind catches fire, and burns;

Rain falls, and makes us cold.

* "We live as we dream - alone." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

L'infini

L'amertume me consume

Dans le douceur d'un fruit :

La terminaison d'un aboutissement

Qui finit par finir, comme l'infini.

Sand

Sometimes, I do not know if there are tears in my eyes

Because I am sleepy, or

Because I know sadness, loneliness -

"Oh, it's just sand," Pyotr said.

Vote Woes

"What is the relationship between democracy and statistics?" Fuentes asked. She was not talking about statistics on democracy. Her question had to do with the underlying democratic assumptions shaping the statistical approach - i.e. include all 'individuals' by reducing them to tiny, equal units, and count 'em!

"Well yes," Fuentes said, "I know that's not real democracy either. But isn't that how it's practiced in actuality?"

Three days later, Fuentes was cooked by the democratic stove. The statistical machine counted her as 1 victim among 3,000,000,000,000 victims. "But she will be missed," the democratic voice recorder blurted out. The voice recorder broke after 2,999,999,999,999 times. The bell curve fell through the cracks. "Oh," Fuentes said from above with disinterest, "bye, statistics."

Eyes

Pages of your new book glimmer

In the way of snow

It isn't the color

It is the sparkle

Of your own eyes

Astray

I want to be away,

Look here, a star

Gone astray.

The Right to Write

I was surprised to learn that Amy Bishop had been a writer. A serious writer, in fact. What a writer needs most is patience. Someone should have told her that. John Irving should have told her. Had he? Amy Bishop would have been able to figure out everything on her own about agents, about writing, and making it commercially successful. What she needed most, instead, was patience, which is what every writer needs. Nothing in the world is worth obliteration. Didn't she know? Patience doesn't just mean a caring attitude. It also means making a cruel, nihilistic attitude truly one's own. That's the difficulty of patience. As a writer, she must have been extremely sensitive to the injustices all around her, and most of all, to her own sense of powerlessness. Oh, who isn't powerless? But she lacked patience, and that is her own fault. An impatient writer! Pff, that is not a writer. I know Amy Bishop had the potential to create real literature. She had everything, including the misery and the stupid pride and the family and the dark-dark-dark past and intelligence and failure and fate and frustration, lots of it, and ambition and dreams and dispair and an asinine spouse and schizophrenia and imagination and terrible stupidity docked with strange genius, all EXCEPT PATIENCE! Someone, oh please, tell her in jail that what she needed was patience. She has to find out. But now, it is too late. Too late, even to have patience. Stupid professor. That is pathetic. She should have told herself she was a writer first, and a professor second, no matter how the world viewed her. Then, she might have figured out in time that what she needed badly was patience, and as a writer, she was going to have to work on acquiring patience, bit by bit. But instead, she looked the other way. Like a very careless driver. Is it too late for her to write now? I would like to say, quiet, no. Everyone's got to have a chance at writing, even a criminal and murderer. But the world will emphatically say: YES, IT IS TOO LATE FOR HER. She has even lost the right to write. She has killed herself (oh yes, she did), and taken the others with her against their will, for her lack of patience. Why, an impatient person has no right to write. No write to right.

Limited

Lesotho has mountains, snow, beautiful rondavels,

It is a kingdom

A kingdom of letters,

A neutral state,

The humble one, though

HIV and marijuana are there, too

Then stepping into South Africa,

Oh braai, I may try the monkeygland sauce,

But would like to fly also to Bhutan

And then Switzerland

Connecting the rays, stopping over in

Assam and Piedmont

The Acrobat

Acrobatic, sepak takraw.

Flipping, trembling, rolling as necessary.

Dancing, like a strong insect, or a fish

Out of water but still strong, breathing like a tiger.

Shaw.

Warm words strung together, beads of light.

Muscle strength,

Far, far, away dreams.

Chiara Massini, Harpsichordist

Chiara Massini's harpsichord is the best,

She speaks thze lanzzgzuage so wzezll anzd szhe

zdzazzzznzcze zzzszzzzzzoznzzzzthzezzstzringszzof

zTzimezz szo wezzll

Tzzhe zzoLd zziznstruzzmenzt zzwzhiczhz is nzot

zzSzo ozzlzzd

Buzt is nezw bezczause ozf tzhe dazncing

zzzSzzzPzzzIzzzzzzRzzzzzzzzzIzzzzzzzzzzzzTzzzzzzU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA8LQJypou8

Diri

“I like to be ugly,” Diri told herself. She worked hard to look ugly. And she was fine with that.

“Your name sounds like diarrhea,” Elizabeth-Christine said to Diri.

“Thank you,” Diri said. “Thank you, Elizabeth-Christine.”

Elizabeth-Christine looked startled. “What?” Elizabeth-Christine whispered silently. Then she ran and got behind Diri, and put her hands over Diri’s eyes. She said to Diri, “Diri. You don’t speak English. You don’t understand English. You are dumb, you are quiet, and now look, you are blind. Dumb, quiet, and blind! Hahaha.”

Diri felt tears gathering under her closed eyelids, but she also felt a fart gathering at the end her spine. The tears, they did not go away, but the fart did not, either. Diri, in a desperate fit, let go of Elizabeth-Christine’s hands, and finding a chair directly in front of her, climbed on it, and farted, just in time, right into Elizabeth-Christine’s face.

Elizabeth-Christine smirked. She sighed. Then she gasped, and let out a yelp. She began to cry. Tears flowed freely on Elizabeth-Christine's cheeks. Diri wanted to feel sorry for Elizabeth-Christine, but could not.

“Dumb and quiet,” Diri said.

“Not speaking,” Mrs. Sundrum, the E.S.L. teacher, explained.

Diri drew a flower.

A Curriculum of Questioning: Inquiring the Beyond

“Well,” Mr. Schoonmaker said. “Tom would never be able to survive in a corporate environment if he keeps on questioning too much.”

“Why is that?” Ms. Deacon asked.

“Well,” Mr. Schoonmaker replied. “In the traditional corporate environment, preserving the hierarchical structure of the corporation is ‘key.’ And may I add that all corporations are, by definition, traditional.”

Editor’s Note: Schools can be corporations, too.

Alive!

My body is like a farm;

I finally understand it's alive!

Surrealist Time

I was almost going to miss the bus, but

Caught the handle of my umbrella in the little handle on the side of the bus,

Which never came.

Beep beep, surrealism!!

Disunity

Stranded we stand

Ignored we stand

Hurt we stand

Confused we stand

We, the lonely people

We slipped on a banana.

Ma'am,

"Ma'am, did you order 1,001 ice creams?"

"Yes, dear, what?"

"What what?"

"What what what?"

"What what what what?"

"What what what what, what?"

The ice cream all melted, except for one scoop, which melted soon after.

Zebra

Oh zebra, come to me, oh zebra

Come to me, oh zebra

Zebra, come to me, oh

Stories to Pass On

Genocide, mass murder, human acts of atrocity: they say.

Yogurt said: "But you know. Those things were awful. Terrible. Abominable. And people suffered a lot because of them. They still continue to suffer. Sometimes, animals and plants and fish and stars, too."

Yogurt cried.

Yogurt then said: "But if you highlight people's suffering too much, their suffering because of the genocides, mass murders, and human acts of atrocity, then someone in the future is bound to commit those terrible acts again."

Yogurt said: "You know why? Because human hate knows no bounds. When humans learn that killing and burning can bring about so much suffering, for a while, they will know compassion. But when they are suddenly provoked, and believe they are in danger, they will want to retaliate very aggressively - justly or unjustly, it hardly matters. And if they know that bombing, slashing, cutting, and pillaging will somehow relieve them of their stress, their own inner suffering, their bonds that they can no longer stand, they will really bomb and slash and cut and pillage."

Yogurt added: "Here is the contradiction. Stories of suffering must be passed down. But too much of that breeds more violence. The knowledge of the suffering of others can turn murderous. And yet, stories of resilience are also dangerous. Perpetrators of violence would overestimate their victims' capacity to survive."

So what ought to be passed on, then, is this very conundrum: "Which stories to pass on, and why?"

With the knowledge that not all stories can be passed on. The Ark has a limited hold. Doesn't it?

Soseki's Birthday

Today is Soseki Natsume's birthday.

Happy birthday, Soseki!

Thanks, Google, for the reminder.

I like how the cat has run off with the second "o" and stamped a trail of paw marks on Soseki's manuscripts. But then Soseki's head is the third "o" which shouldn't exist. How eerie!

The cat is, as you know, a reference to I Am a Cat.

Exceptionalism

Exceptionalism is the most dangerous philosophy in the world.

It breeds exclusivity.

Hubris.

Yet we really do mean well when we say, "Well, oh, you are so exceptional."

See: "Not a Mannequin."

Also see: "Role Models (2)."

How to resolve the contradiction?

Will I Beg?

I will beg, in times of absolute need -

Will I beg?

Is begging ignoble?

Would pain crush me?

What is the difference between begging, praying, and swindling?

What is real magic?

Water

I drink water -

But not in order to live longer, necessarily.

Just that water tastes better.