'Every era believes that there is a literary genre that
has a kind of primacy. Today, for example, any writer who
has not written a novel is asked when he is going to write
one. (I myself am continually being asked.) In Shakespeare's
time, the literary work par excellence was the vast
epic poem, and that idea persisted into the eighteenth cen-
tury, when we have the example of Voltaire, the least epic
of men, who nevertheless writes an epic because without an epic
he would not have been a true man of letters for his contempo-
raries.' --Borges (1964), in: Selected Non-Fictions

'The long, long night of the Eleventh Month!
   I will cut its waist in two.
Putting the half confusedly
   Under the quilt of the spring wind,

So that, the night he comes back,
   I will unfold it for him.'

Zin-i Hwang, in: A Pageant of Korean Poetry

"the flight was long. we flew on a japanese plane that had strange wallpaper of drawings of little characters from all nations. the ones from italy were botticelli and michelangelo figures. strange to see a man's penis on the wallpaper of a commercial airplane though." --Beck

More on Salam Pax. (via Metafilter)

"DB: With the U.S. economy deteriorating and with more layoffs, how is the
Bush administration going to maintain what some are calling a garrison state
with permanent war and occupation of numerous countries? How are they going
to pull it off?

NC: They have to pull it off for about another six years. By that time they
hope they will have institutionalized highly reactionary programs within the
United States. They will have left the economy in a very serious state, with
huge deficits, pretty much the way they did in the 1980s. And then it will
be somebody else’s problem to patch it together." --interview with Noam Chomsky

There are some works i seldom listen to, yet represent for me a sort of ne plus ultra of musical
achievement; one of these being the "Threnody to the New Victims of Hiroshima" by Q.R. Ghazala, an
electronic musician who builds his own instruments, including the "vox insecta" which performs this.
His aim was to synthesize an insect voice that is the voice of all insects, & doubtless he has succeeded.
The monotonous, almost subliminally-varying buzz is just a little more disturbing than white noise, & one
can ask if an insect orchestra would really not invest more effort in dynamics, since bugs in general seem
not overfond of repose. But these are quibbles. It's a masterpiece.

I saw "Bruce Almighty" the other day--it had some funny moments. But i think the filmmakers
really missed their chance with the schmaltzy ending. He should have kept meddling until he
destroyed the world a la "Dr Strangelove". Wouldn't that be a gas? But perhaps, as
people keep saying, "irony is dead". --Or rather, that is not a story that can be told from Dubya's
POV...

Can't get that place Tokelau out of my mind. One boat goes there a month from Samoa.

I remember getting the word "Availibilism"* from someone in the 80's; & i see in the end all my
philosophies converge there. Or, to be more respectable, "bricolage". Use what you have. Don't
pine for gold-nib pens & violet-indigo ink (which once i mixed up just so i could write in that color--),
don't wait for the Nobel committee to come knocking on your door. If you find yourself shipwrecked
on an island (preferably Tokelau) without modems, make art out of sticks & mud...

"Imagine giving the KKK billions of dollars to victimize African-Americans. This is essentially what's happening when you pay your taxes, you're paying for the harrassment, eviction, and murder of Palestinians Arabs. You're paying for the bullets to kill and cripple Palestinians pre-teens." --Kurt Nimmo at Dr Menlo dot com.

Horned Kangaroos--no, it's not genetic engineering (this time), it's Australian fossils.

Oh, alright, i gotta post it--if only for the parasite key ring.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*I find the word (though spelled "AVAILABISM") on the "Voluptuous Horror
of Karen Black" website--though i'd almost swear i saw it used somewhere
in Angry Women (Re/Search)--perhaps by Karen Finley...

    ”Moorawathimeering

Into moorawathimeering,
where atninga dare not tread,
leaving wurley for a wilban,
tallabilla, you have fled.

Wombalunga curses, waitjurk--
though we cannot break the ban,
and follow tchidna any further
after one-time karaman.

Far in moorawathimeering,
safe from wallan darenderong,
tallabilla waitjurk, wander
silently the whole day long.

Go with only lilliri
to walk along beside you there,
while douran-douran voices wail
and Karaworo beats the air.”

--Rex Ingamells in: The Jindyworobaks, ed. Brian Elliott 1979

moorawathimeering- the Land of the lost, a sanctuary for outcasts
atninga- a group sent to carry out tribal justice; vengeance party
wurley- dwelling; hut or shelter of boughs
wilban- cave
tallabilla- outlaw
wombalunga- carry
waitjurk- murderer
tchidna- footprint
karaman- leader
wallan- strong
darendarong- avenger
lilliri- shadow
douran douran- north wind
karaworo- eaglehawk

The Heavy Metal Umlaut.

More Euro news.

‘ “Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts; ...All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana. That is what gives power to certain people among us, to those who are half awake: that is the cause of the well-known time lag of a century in our artistic and intellectual life; novelties attract us only when they are dead, incapable of arousing vital currents... I said Sicilians, I should have added Sicily, the atmosphere, the climate, the landscape of Sicily. Those are the forces which have formed our minds. ...this landscape which knows no mean between sensuous slackness and hellish drought; which is never petty, nver ordinary, never relaxed, as a country made for rational beings to live in should be...this climate which inflicts us with six feverish months at a temperature of a hundred and four; count them, Chevalley, count them: May, June, July, August, September, October; six times thirty days of sun sheer down on our heads; this summer of ours which is as long and glum as a Russian winter and against which we struggle with less success...” ‘ --Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1958; tr Archibald Colquhoun, 1960) [one of the best things ever written about Texas & Texans--wasn’t.]

The new death camps. (via metafilter & others)

So the address i'd been playing chess at--http://b2-b4.tk (now dot com)--is Tokelau! Where's that?

Atari emulators, like that car the Excalibur--modern underneath, retro on top--are a kind of glimflash.

Blogwise dot com has listed "Xvarenah" among its blogs on poetics. I wonder if meta-blogging is the next big thing...

“In 1921 a poetry magazine Zangmi-czon or the Rose-Village was published, where Zong-hwa Bag (pen name, Wôltan or Moon and Shallow) and Yônghûi Bag (pen name, Hoewôl or Thinking of the Moon) wrote decadentic poetry. In the following year a literary magazine Bêgzo or The White Tide produced three poets, Sa-yong Hong (pen name, Nozag or The Dew Sparrow), Sang-hwa Yi (pen name, Sang-hwa or Thinking of Fire), and Gi-zin Gim (pen name, Palbong or the Eight Peaks), and they were rather humanistic. In the same year a poetry magazine Gûmsông or The Venus was published by a group of nationalistic lyrists, Zu-dong Yang (pen name, Mue or The Endless), Zanghûi Yi (pen name, Gowôl or The Old Moon), and others.” --In-Sôb Zông, A Pageant of Korean Poetry (1963)

‘This game, which I myself had invented, was based on the proposition that just as nouns could be divided into masculine, feminine and neuter, so there was a distinction between tragic and comic nouns. For example, this system decreed that steamship and steam engine were both tragic nouns, while streetcar and bus were comic.’ --Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human (tr Donald Keene 1958) [--H'm. Poetry is tragic, while blog is comic...but poetics is comic & blogger is tragic...]

    ’This Body

This body
Is a blown leaf.
Till it is buried under the earth, wet by dew,
According to the blowing wind, in the evening sky,
I will be blown and willwhisper.

This body
Is a broken piece of a ship pushed in on the seashore.
Till it is frozen by the cold wind,
As the waves move among the reeds,
It will move and swing.

This body
is a sick and useless body.
Till the ants build their storehouses in this body,
It will recite and sing as it sees and hears,
And I shall pray in a remote place.’

Un Zo, in: A Pageant of Korean Poetry

Pollack recants on NPR. I guess that storm wasn't so threatening, after all...

SARS from Mars.

An interview with Coffin Joe.

The lunatics in charge...

Listening to: "Sepharad: Songs of the Spanish Jews in the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire" (DHM, 1996).

N.B. we are greatly mistaken in trying to force ourselves to concentrate more often than a few times a day, or longer than a few minutes at a time. Coffee only simulates the effects of concentration: it shuts out peripheries, but does not direct to one centerpoint. That takes interest. For concentration is the preparatory state for a precise act. When no such exactitude is needed, concentration wastes itself either in embellishments or excess pre-fitting (this accounts for how a lot of postmodern art looks, busy without being energetic; its "surrealism" is often all too premeditated). The normal state for humans, as other mammals, is relaxation (ditention, for maximum alertness to marginal sign-threshold phenomena). (Nowadays we have to learn how to relax without falling asleep or into a trance, and it's easier to fake it with alcohol & downers than condition the CNS to move quickly through several states.)

Prolonged concentration becomes stressful, generating the psychic equivalents of embellishments (complexes) & excess prefitting (neurosis). Boredom may be defined as a drive towards concentration in the absence of any interesting thing to focus on. It comes from habitual concentration on banal objects. A free person doesn't choose to force his attention; it happens automatically with learning. What makes something interesting is its potential for completing a larger gestalt (i have also described this as "relevant novelty"). Thus you have to have a worldview-context in order to be able to interest yourself in many things. Otherwuise they're just Noise, or else stimulation for an idle curiosity that won't bother to make sense of it, and learns nothing. (TV without real education is perceived very differently than TV with; that is, even its banality can be informative.)

Autumnal & eternal rose,
Where dreams divide & time lays siege,
The stuff of deliquescent throes,
A moment in the eyes of one mad liege.

Pale, I remember, ultramarine
Was then the sea. Now fathoms close
About that locket’s fall, while green
Remains to me the wither of the rose.

Her revenant rose & came to dwell
Here with a fragment from that dream
Who twice himself tried ring the knell…
What profits dry bones strewn where roses teem?

So two unfound ones fill the clothes
Of others born to such prestige
And fake it. Nonetheless, some rose
Wafture permeates the rusted cage.

11 17 00

'The rancid chrysanthemum aches' --Hagiwara Sakutarô, Howling at the Moon

Isn't Insomnia the anguished knowledge that you have wasted the day, that you have done nothing?--And the wish for immortality, of whatever ilk, isn't that a spiritual insomnia, the thirst for infinity from never having grasped one's finitude in the world's particularity?? The fame that would fill our ears is a rude misunderstanding translated into archetypal clarity; the plenitude that consoles and delivers a creator at the time of creation is a precise comprehension of one perfect nuance of form--and you can jabber all you want about Art and artworks and never come close to this paradox. It is not for sharing. What the community can possess is an abundance of creative persons and room for them to grow in. Either a place sparkles with its own energies or it is a dustbin and matter-trap (though it explode, rage, and whirl with unconsummated inertias). When will there be a civilization that treasures silence, then music, and only after, speech? --Not by talking about it--

In case you wondered what the leaflets we dropped on Iraq look like.

A haiku by Lt. Smash:

   “Sunrise

A beautiful dawn
Scent of sulfur in the air
Not a tree in sight."

"The underlying problem is not that certainty is the opposite of doubt, but rather that certainty is the opposite of complexity. I sometimes think that the political spectrum today runs not on a left-right axis, but rather on a simple-complex one." --Silliman's Blog

I'm a Badger.

I see the Wikipedia article on 70 Virginis has been amended to reflect my contribution. When this star was first discovered to have a planet, all sorts of news reports went out that a "new water world" had been found. It took me a lot of searching, but i found the original article. Which i realized used information about the distance of the star that was out of date. According to Hipparchos, it can't have oceans (except at considerably more air pressure than on Earth), & so it is not a good candidate for life. But there is virtually nothing on the internet to reflect this--even on sites that give the correct distance... I may still write about this star one day; it has generated its own mythology so quickly.

      "Ort of the Bad Hours"

The brother of a cactus once i knew,
Scattering of dog bristles
Across the rust tile floor.
At six thousand feet
An upsidedown mouse.
I remember the silver dazzle
Of almost formless mist
We were driving through yesterday,
And the Wiki comes with me.

9 15 01

A wonderful compendium of some of the uses Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has been put to, & related matters. (via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Zeitgeist. There was a time when, as a Whig (Retro Avant Garde), i prowled antique malls not in search of objets de virtu, but for icons redolent to me of the periods that i preferred to my own. Just the other night i saw "Down with Love", & realized that to be Whig is no longer even slightly Avant--it's mainstream. (Which won't make me throw out my kidney-shaped two-tier coffee table, though.) Moreover, this tendency has been visible in all sorts of places you wouldn't expect: there's been a renaissance in "Hard" scifi from about the early 90's; & even Retro chess openings, starting likewise thereabouts (Scotch Opening, Four Knights' Game--which i would've sworn would never be played again between grandmasters). And now i see that what we are experiencing is not just a Cold War Nostalgia--it's a McCarthy Flashback!

This is how i'd display my links if i knew how to do it. (via Dr Menlo) The artform of the Blog finally starts to leave its print-based shapes behind...

I say i forget everything--why? Does this mean i believe thoughts are only words and when i stop using a set of words i no longer have those thoughts? Or are thoughts consumed--without ash--in recombination? (Well, what happens to my food? I name kinds of dishes, but not each one: maybe what i thought yesterday and today, is just one kind of idea, a matter of chef's convenience, but the active part is its atoms--) I mourn the natural progression of conscious act into reflexive habit, not in my muscles, only when it happens with the brain-muscle... I remember everything, really: in the "unconscious". So this complaint is like saying: I shouldn't sleep. (Did Gurdjieff? Even at the wheel!)

The recurrence of my concerns is proof enough they were underground awhile and have surfaced again, like certain subway trains.

I'm not a naturally reflective person and it seems absurd to me now that i thought i was. The sort of self-perceptions i do have are almost traceless, they come and then meeting some interceptor disappear before ever having been verbalized & made permanently conscious. Like iridescent colors, green becoming red and everything in between, instantly, so that we don't have a chance to identify one at a time, but call it: iridescence. And i call it: forgetfulness. But isn't it rather the ternal watchfulness of that intercepting force, that my emotions seem viewed through an opera glass far away and small and brightly unreal? That puts a distance in front of my response? Should i say it's--reflection? Reflecting daylight...into a camera obscura. And so it is that i make images. Because in my dark room i am curious...but with a curiosity that is satisfied with any image--.

Four-kanji proverbs. (via Language Hat) --I think i'm going to try this in Lojban!

"He's a tormented soul, because he doesn't want to turn into a monster; yet he enjoys the feeling of power.." --Stan Lee on The Hulk (substitute: The American Empire)

In a film i saw, [the Spanish surrealist playwright] Arrabal called Bobby Fischer a mystic. Yes. As there are insights which change nothing, so also does the world have impotent divinities.

If a sculptor of marble gets diverted into making mud-pies, that's not tragic. If the world runs out of marble and he goes around busting up old statues for their material, that's just being practical. But if the world still has marble and he believes (whether told or self-deluded) that marble must be made in the mind and can only be had by wishing for it, that's tragic.

    "The Last Artists"

They learned every coercion,
  forgot how to ask.

(4 17 83)

'Where men are lacking, strive to be a man.' --sayings of Rabbi Hillel, quoted in: Kaufmann, Religion in 4 Dimensions

Art would be so much less a mystery if we all were artists and never kept what wasn't fully inspired. Then we wouldn't have to bust our definitions trying to include everything that anybody ever kept...trying to put into words the nonverbal part because all we understand is words...

The avantgarde is a necessary position because today art must provide what used to be taken for granted, a common cultural context... --i wrote to [my publisher]. But the absence of culture is our common context, and so the struggle is not against dead traditions but against indiscriminate eclecticism. Most of those who appear to be "traditional" artists* have borrowed a few signs from the impressionists, some from the Dutch Masters (not much! not enough!), and the rest from the corpse-corpus of Academic painting as it has lingered in textbooks alone. What is their attitude? That subject matter and a certain "finish" make a legitimate picture. Well? By their refusal to take chances, they are killing art with Boredom. (Wanting to paint just like Rembrandt or Vermeer is a slavish ambition, but at least it's ambitious--like all those who climb Mt Everest after the first one...)

HERE IS THE NIETZSCHE QUOTE ALL NIETZSCHEANS OVERLOOK: (From Kaufmann's Will to Power)
'46. "Weakness of the Will": that is a metaphor that can prove misleading. For there is no will, and consequently neither a strong nor a weak will. The multitude and disgregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order among them result in a "weak will"; their coordination under a single predominant impulse results in a "strong will": in the first case it is the oscillation and the lack of gravity; in the latter, the precision and the clarity of the direction.'
---------------------------------------------------------
*this goes double for NeoFormalists. What an epidemic of epigonorrhea!

We got in an old book on "Fighting Venereal Diseases". Glued inside the front cover is a letter dated 1920 from the Treasury Dept, US Public Health Service instructing that "This book is to be placed in all Dallas barber shops...You may not be aware of the fact that during the year 1919, over fifteen hundred Dallas citizens visited specialists on venereal diseases and were found to be infected with either gonorrhea or syphilis. Thirty-four of these fifteen hundred died."

The first new Chicken joke of the 21c: "comrade #1: Comrade, why did the free-range chicken cross the road?

comrade # 2: Because she enjoyed exercising her rights as a free citizen of the range!" (from tinylittlepenis.com)

"Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector, has compared the invasion of Iraq to Hitler's invasion of Poland. He told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper that 130 Americans had died "for a lie", adding: "I see no difference between the invasion of Iraq and the invasion of Poland in 1939." Both invasions were based on what he said was an artificial argument of self-defense. President George W Bush had used the September 11 attacks as Hitler used the 1933 burning of the Reichstag to repress domestic dissidents." (from drmenlo.com)

Eduardo Kac had a rabbit made with jellyfish DNA, so it glows chartreuse in a certain wavelength of blue light. Here's his page on what he calls "transgenic art". I wrote this limerick about it:

      "On Alba, the G F P Bunny"

   With help from some whitecoats, Ed Kac
   Patched the genes of a rabbit in spots,
     So the right wavelength'd blues
     Turn her pelt bright chartreuse.
   What's wrong with this picture? Er...lots.

5-13-01

Texans who hunt illegal aliens. (I'm sure they hold hands & pray first.)

"Adamant nights in which our wisest apes
Met on a cracked mud terrace not yet Ur
And with presumption more than amateur
Stared the random starlight into shapes." --Merrill

"All those contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties comic art. They're semiotic phantoms..." --William Gibson in: Mirrorshades

--Take a moment to consider that phrase: semiotic phantoms. I'm beginning to think the Twentieth Century can be explained by nothing else; that our term "ideology", far from referring to any sort of reasoned system, describes rather the simple prevalence of such phantoms that, once expected, punctually make their appearance. I have examined all the books that purport to contain ideological systems, in search of a definitive solidity, but found nothing but immense heaps of patches. The phenomena came first & every objection of common sense had to be dealt with, as it naturally arose. Patches, & still more patches! The phenomena were sacrosanct. Here is a true koan: why is it easier to believe some things than others? (You know, the first time it was raised, they made him drink fucking hemlock.) And i'm still looking for the counter-koan: what do you do to make someone stop believing something they believe in just because it makes them feel good?

Like maybe: WAIT THREE HUNDRED YEARS.

I don't want to hear another person talk about the NeoCons as if they had managed to give intellectual rigor to their politics of bigotry & superstition. They are anti-intellectuals who read, but that doesn't make them intellectuals; if you read for the sole purpose of justifying your prejudices, that makes you an anti-intellectual. (Something the Right has no monopoly on, to be sure.) And it's mostly their "semiotic phantoms" which have infested the present landscape, & caused so much grief & havoc by the stupid things people do who believe in them.

Do you want an example? What about this thing they call "reality television"? It's actually games played with non-professional actors, of course; & only as real as the cameramen & the editors of the raw footage care to present. But what is the idea that it propagates? That none of us is any better than the most venal, self-serving humans they can scrape up. That ALL PEOPLE, EVERYWHERE will do ANYTHING for money. How very useful a belief for the architects of empire! This semiotic phantom, which properly should be called "Normalcy = Moral Squalor", although the people who harbor it would consider it a solacing & sometimes amusing adult-realism, was at one time the exclusive possession of pirates & robber barons, & heartily condemned by the majority of people who knew in their bones that a society is based on reciprocity & acceptance of civil duties, as much as it is on public buildings & infrastructure. And i don't even now think that it has become the belief of a majority of Americans...

Listen. I was just reading in Counterpunch an excellent article on Things You Can Do Against the Republicans. But little by little something started nagging at me, till at last i had to stop in disgust. It was steeped in a certain class-illusion, one i was born to & cannot wholly abjure, that i have to characterize to myself as the "Periclean Bourgeoisie Syndrome". It has to do with one's sense of personal empowerment, of the sphere of action possible to a person of your station in life. If i had been born otherwise, i know it would be utterly impossible for me to believe in some of the things i have, such as "you can be anything you want to be" & "what matters is what's inside you"... Not that it's not a good thing to want to always tell the truth, for example, believing that this is in all situations the route to an optimal outcome. But even the most privileged slave of Pericles himself could have told you that dissembling is required to the precise extent that there is inequity in personal power. (I would have made a bad slave.)

I think of a certain scene in the remake of "The Thomas Crown Affair", when Pierce Brosnan is out racing his million-dollar sailboat with another rich man. Then he wrecks it on purpose, just for the hell of it. This is a portrait of American politics. Once i cheered, because the sailboat of "my team" won. Does this mean i really have a boat of my own in the race? You could say this is cynical, because it promotes apathy. My answer is that as a philosopher begins by removing all the false notions before he can ever come up with a new one that is possibly true, you have to give up your class illusions in order to see what kind of action is possible for you in the real world. I WILL be voting in 2004. But not to salve my conscience!

So, what does a real "blow for freedom" look like? What about that anonymous casino employee who broke the story of William Bennett's gambling addiction? Damage control can try all it can, but he's never going to be as shiny as he was before. And there's a certain blogger in Iraq, who i think has accomplished more than any other figure on the Internet (except maybe Michael Moore--): simply by being what he is. A human being, who happened to be born in Iraq... And how different these things are, from the idea of asking complete strangers for money, till you've accumulated enough to build your own million-dollar sailboat--that the officials probably won't let you run in the race anyway.

"...Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few." --Shelley

'Just as the most terrible fears come at noontide, when, risen to his zenith and hidden behind his violet shields, the evil Dragon [i.e. the sun] weaves his spells, so the deepest mystery is revealed only when the masks are removed.' --Sologub in: The Russian Symbolist Theater

"People often die in the night, devoured by their own nightmares." --Greg Bear in Mirrorshades

"There is a secret society of seven men that controls the finances of the world. This is known to everyone, but the details are not known. There are those who believe it would be better if one of the seven were a financier." --R A Lafferty, "About a Secret Crocodile"

"Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours (1739-1817).
Founding the Dupont Company wasn't enough for this eccentric French aristocrat who had immegrated to the United States. An avid naturalist and birdwatcher he also compiled two dictionaries in 1807, which he entitled Crow-French and Nightingale-French. In them he gave what he called the French translations of the various calls of the crow and the nightingale.

The cat, claimed the French-American author, is a better speaker than the dog. 'The cat,' he explained, 'has the advantage of a language which has the same vowels as pronounced by the dog with six consonants in addition: m, n, g, h, v and f. Consequently the cat has a greater number of words.'" --Robert Hendrickson, American Literary Anecdotes (1990)

An old poem of mine from the Eighties:

Hitler lost
but the concentration camp
won

"Solitude is the richness of self. Loneliness is the poverty of self." --May Sarton

'I still am able to find some enchantment
In trifles I meet quite by accident:
A book with title and the ending missing,
This rose I hold, withering, without scent.

It pleases me that drops of rain are trembling
Silver and pure upon its moiré velours,
That I found this rose on a dirty sidewalk,
That I'll toss it into the trash, for sure.'

--George Ivanov, in: Modern Russian Poetry

One of my Volapük poems: "Neif tü Reinüp" ('Knife at Raintime')

   Fidil pefalöl dese lusil,
   O lecütel, tobuls no dönu
   olükömons is lienetiks.
   Exilonok mekavamüster
   nesinifodio sembal, e
   mutob gegivön ad ol voli
   kölöfikum keli älärnob
   da logs ola, voli de fil kel
   päfanon fa ob de oliks muds
   tel, e voli dolas luplikün
   in ola lad keli ädünob.

(Ort fallen from the sorry sky, O great deceiver, Mad Octobers will not arrive here again. The artificial mystery has banished itself to some meaninglessness or other, & i must give you back the world more colorful i learned through your eyes, the world of fire that was caught by me from your mouths twain, & the world of most wolfish griefs in your heart which i served.)

Accent always on the last syllable.

"Maned with light, ember and anodyne" --Jamres Merrill, Divine Comedies

Read in Plimpton's Shadow Box about the meeting of Marianne Moore & Muhammed Ali. They wrote a poem together. Later she went to watch him box--wearing her tricorne hat.

...[In the closed stacks] i scanned Enver Hoxha's memoirs. The Albanian dictator was describing a meeting with Tito. Tito's dog kept farting. Then they went for a ride in a rowboat. The dog swam after them &, climbing aboard, almost capsized it (Hoxha couldn't swim). The dog shook himself dry all over Hoxha's suit, soaking him.

"...justifications for the prison's existence, six-foot letters in a language nobody could read." --Paul Park, Soldiers of Paradise (1987)

"A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age." --Neil Postman, Technopoly (1992)

The first qualification to be a poet nowadays is not to read poetry. There is no second qualification.

Do i not believe in my own freedom at all, even as i understand that so much of this & my earlier acknowledged errors, happened precisely because i knew better & refused to do the sensible thing, over & over? It's like the gambler who continues to lose money--you can't call it, after a certain point, hope. Only the shape of hope. Which is almost a calling, a cry for hope to come... I believe that, as long as i don't mistake this wrongness, my lucidity itself will protect me. With the same fearlessness, once i hitchhiked cross-country with nothing but a dime in my pocket; but the only proper use of this state, very likely, is the beginning of a very ambitious artwork (which all its other uses, are nothing but metaphors for--)... these knots i seem to be weaving, aren't they evidence of stories beginning to tell themselves, somewhere deeper than i have yet been able to look for them?

A new speech by the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy. There aren't many public figures i respect, but she is one of them. (via Robot Wisdom) Vonnegut's always worth listening to, too.

"Saturated


I am trying to reconcile two thoughts, though life keeps firing back, disrupting the ability to create. I want to do well on the occasion of this presentation. I focus on the hope of the mother-wordsmith and the father who makes moving pictures. I think their daughter incredibly lucky to be born to such art. So I try to reconcile the two thoughts, to whittle them down to their most precise point, so I can turn them inside out and make something new and learn from the mere act of creation.

My memory, a month later, is still saturated with images of oak trees in New Orleans; not just the proud stately ones which are insured for millions of dollars and inhabit the emerald grounds of the plantation famous for being so photogenic. Breathtaking, yes, but so scrupulously maintained; awe inspiring, no doubt, but that¹s not where my mind wanders. Instead, I keep reliving the scene at South Alexander Street where the oak trees are almost as old and beautiful, but more reckless as they have been victimized, boxed into a corner. That was a long time ago, a hundred years or more, and they have long forgotten how to be polite. There remain no vestiges of Southern hospitality on South Alexander Street, where the roots, the thick, twisted, knotted fingers, of the live oak trees have taken over, demolishing the sidewalk; an intriguing disarray of cracked and buckled concrete slabs. The handiwork of a silent terrorist. The sheer heft of these roots, and the force with which they reveal their presence, strikes me as powerfully poetic and even comforting, the way they just go on and on undeterred. I think if I could just capture the right words I would have a poem benefiting the birth of a child.

The second thought I have concerns my beautiful seven year old niece who, from the day she was born, has brought such enormous joy into my life. Hilary Rodham had it right when she said it took a village; that¹s what it¹s like in our household: husband, sister, brother-in-law, and niece. I show my niece a photograph I took inside a historic New Orleans townhouse; it¹s a life size portrait of a proud Creole matriarch. My niece studies the woman¹s finery, runs her finger across the photo, then asks me, in a voice that is both sweet and filled with concern, a question so frank it startles me, sets off a tremor in my solar plexus.

³Aunt Melanie, was she a good person?²

I can¹t imagine why my niece would ask such a thing. I look at the portrait. I look at my niece, her face so pretty and open to a world of possibilities. At that instant, though, her voice is tinged with something inexplicably fully-grown. I do not know how to answer her, but it never occurs to me to say that. Instead, I offer a pat explanation about how the woman most likely thought of herself as a good Catholic. I know it¹s a weak answer, but I hope it¹s enough to suit her.

Later my niece and I play a board game, and I still think of roots and my own childhood; the way we used to have to call the plumber once or twice a year because the cottonwood¹s roots stifled our plumbing. I think I might want to hunt down my grandma¹s old ivory dominoes and teach my niece how to play, just like my grandma taught me. And I continue to think about roots and childhood and difficult questions. And I am saturated with thoughts of these things."

Melanie Pruit

The 14 Defining Characteristics Of Fascism
Free Inquiry Spring 2003 5-11-3

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.
6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed
to the government's policies or actions.
9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
They Thought They Were Free
By Milton Mayer
http://www.thirdreich.net/Thought_They_Were_Free_nn4.html
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945",
University of Chicago Press. Reissued in paperback, April, 1981.
As Harpers Magazine noted when the book was published in 1955 (U. of Chicago), Milton Mayerâsextraordinarily far-sighted book on the Germans is more timely today than ever·ä
This crucial book tells how and why 'decent men' became Nazis through short biographies of 10 law-abiding citizens. An American journalist of German/Jewish descent, Mr. Mayer provides a fascinating window into the lives, thoughts and emotions of a people caught up in the rush of the Nazi movement. It is a book that should make people pause and think -- not only about the Germans, but also about themselves.
But Then It Was Too Late
"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing to do with knowing one is governing.
What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the universe was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was "expected to" participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."
"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. "One had no time to think. There was so much going on." "Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your "little men", your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the "national enemies", without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - "Resist the beginnings" and "consider the end." But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn't, but they might have. And everyone counts on that might.
"Your "little men," your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemoller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing: and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something - but then it was too late."
"Yes," I said.
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, "everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to you colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, "It's not so bad" or "You're seeing things" or "You're an alarmist."
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to ö to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked ö if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in "43" had come immediately after the "German Firm" stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in "33". But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying "Jew swine," collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in ö your nation, your people ö is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done ( for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or "adjust" your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."
I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.
"I can tell you," my colleague went on, "of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn't an anti Nazi. He was just ö a judge. In "42" or "43", early "43", I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an "Aryan" woman. This was "race injury", something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case a bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a "nonracial" offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party "processing" which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the "nonracial" charge, in the judge's opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom.
"
"And the judge?"
"Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience ö a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That's how I heard about it.) After the "44" Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don't know."
I said nothing.
"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was "defeatism." You assumed that there were lists of those who would be "dealt with" later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a "victory orgy" to "take care of" those who thought that their "treasonable attitude" had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.
"Once the war began, the government could do anything "necessary" to win it; so it was with the "final solution" of the Jewish problem, which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its "necessities" gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."
 Milton Mayer
http://www.rense.com/general37/fascism.htm
(via Metafilter)

"Party like it's 1939!"

"The Fizzer Worm is a Curious Yellow-like worm. It infects Windows systems through a variety of paths, takes control of them, coordinates subsequent infection attempts using an IRC channel. It gets code-updates from a Geocities webpage, so that it can mutate to avoid anti-virus software.

A coalition of IRC operators who've banded together to fight the worm have hijacked the Geocities webpage that Fizzer uses to update itself and they've posted a poison-pill to it. The next time the worm checks for its update, it will download a set of instructions that tell it to uninstall itself." (via Boing Boing)

Usually, it's Westerners who invent artificial languages. Here's the first one invented by a Korean. (Warning: if your browser is Netscape this site will make it crash.)

This site (via Salam Pax) is sort of a gateway to the wonderful world of Muslim Blogs.

Buying in order to define a sensibility. Unbalanced, unless there is also principled divestiture (askesis). To see divestiture as honor—honoring the Void.

Amateurism. Only an amateur believes in the magical efficacy of procedures.

What Buddhism lost from Taoism is its CLOWNS.

“ ‘…No artist paints his own Dreaming. It’s too powerful. It might kill him.’ “ --The Songlines

What addicts us are the METAPHORS for freedom.

“I see the devil can quote Wittgenstein.
He’s blacker than he’s painted.” --Randall Jarrell

“That anyone who dressed so very badly as did Thomas Carlyle should have tried to construct a philosophy of clothes has always seemed to me one of the most pathetic things in literature.” --Max Beerbohm

For my crimes against poetry I am sentenced to logorrhea.

Desire is the part of the Mystery that moves.

Saving Private Lynch. (via Metafilter)

“Leave only three wasps alive in the whole of Europe and the air of Europe will still be more crowded with wasps than space is with stars.” --Sir James Jeans

“The artist who realizes himself inside art will never be creative.” --Witold Gombrowicz

Macaronic pop songs, from “Amore” to “Psycho Killer” & “Loser”.

“ ‘A strangely striped strip of string’ is far too emphatic in sound for its sense, and ‘a terribly powerful Florida hurricane’ is not nearly emphatic enough.” --Robert Graves

“Prostitutes, Kvass finds himself thinking, are paperbacks while affairs are hard cover.” --Gather in the Hall of the Planets

Decadence—when pastiche is the norm.

“For the flying saucer myth, it will always be January 1950.” --Curtis Peebles, Watch the Skies

“…I have also expressed doubts that his [Nabokov’s] aesthetic models—chess puzzles and protective colorations in lepidoptera—can be very helpful ideals for the rest of us.” --John Updike

One day materialism will mean that all things are artist’s material; spirituality, that all things are perfected form already; and no paradox. This word Art is a name for the paradox. There are others.

The Thread Out is another Labyrinth. –sayings of Asmodeus

“There is no law saying that the burlesque of a thing may not appear before the thing itself.” --R A Lafferty

In the end, it becomes a question of whether people who are intolerant will continue to count more than their actual numbers in a putative democracy. So far, the answer is Yes. The trouble is, people too easily see social decay as a problem of excessive autonomy, rather than of deficient reciprocity. This gives the fascists a loophole a mile wide...

Every thought is a palindromic prime.

Is there any point in an invention which would show you the sufferings of people on other planets, without giving you the power to halt it?

I don’t suffer for Art, but I suffer for Chess.

Writings on anarchism are like art criticism for an artform no one yet has practiced.

Nothingness, the ultimate McGuffin.

Reincarnation works for me only as a source of jokes. I told a friend that Crowley’d come back as Leo Buscaglia. She said, “That’s sick!”

‘ “If one man has an idea, that just means that many others will have the same idea at the same time. Anyone who doesn’t see that doesn’t know what an idea is. Thoughts are contagious, even if they are not expressed; perhaps most contagious when they are not expressed.” ‘ --Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face (1916; tr Mike Mitchell 1992)

‘How good bad music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy!’ --Nietzsche

Father knows best. (via This Modern World weblog)

"Tourists are terrorists with cameras. Terrorists are tourists with guns." --Andrei Codrescu, Road Scholar

Sisyphus invented Progress. --sayings of Asmodeus

"If the rhinoceros wrote with his horn, publication would make it tingle." --Gerald Burns

"For natives of Petersburg, the despair of oncoming winter is the natural symbol of all other despairs." --Avril Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok

The Butterfly Alphabet.

The Lojban Group recently received this email:

“Hi,I visited your site and found that it's the biggest website I've ever
visited.I think logban is an attack to the modern languages such as
Turkish,Finnish,German,French,Italian,Spanish and the other modern languages.I
also think that you are colonist or imperialist.It's a good way to have
forgotten the main identities and languages of the countries.I absolutely know
that language is the most important part of Nationalism.If a country's hasn't
got it's own language,the country bound to lose itself.Stop introducing lojban
language.Every country use their own language OK? You stated that lojban is an
international language.What a silly idea! It's a good method of Globalization
Game. Give up using lojban. Go your roots. I know you will ignore this mail but
I'm not stupid and people are not stupid who think samely with me. This is my
comment about lojban. No lojban,no globalism,no colonism,no imperialism. You
can't kill our main languages. Bye............


ONUR”

In traffic, the only way to punish another driver is to wreck your own car. --That's war in a nutshell.

"John Jay Chapman said of Browning that God did duty in his work as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection and preposition, and the same is true of History with Trotsky." --Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (1940)

'To display oneself naked is not the same as telling the story of one's life.' --Bernard Arcand, The Jaguar and the Anteater (tr Wayne Grady, 1993)

After our poet's-home coffeehouse closed, i said capitalism was like the sow that eats her own piglets. "There are 500 year old bars in Europe. That's because there wasn't capitalism 500 years ago."

What a debacle for the human spirit to have come to, that new art is not eagerly received as a miracle in the land; that so many want to make art who aren't even artists. And then, that being an artist entails that one must neither complain about the overproduction of effigies & try to curtail it (however ineffectually; that's a task left seemingly to nonartists) nor indeed, even refer to this situation in or out of one's work; but also, that one accept the near-certainty of being buried in this superfluous abundance landfill-bound--without letting it stain the pure art-ness of the now-compromised product. AN IMPOSSIBLE SITUATION. And how much longer, no one can even guess.

It is typically intellectual to assume that problems can be solved by language alone, just as it is typically antiintellectual to assume that language cannot solve problems at all. Imagine these attitudes transferred, say, to a hammer.

"There is no escape through death from the supreme necessity of self-conquest." --Lafcadio Hearn, Japan's Religions

    'Finale

It does not moan or murmur now, the sea,
The sea.

A dreamless field and colorless, the sea,
The sea.

Pitiful, too, the sea,
The sea.

Clouds without reflections move the sea,
The sea.

It yields its bed to dismal mists, the sea,
The sea.

It too, look now, is dead, the sea,
The sea.'

--Ungaretti

I nearly fell for it myself.

From the New York Times:

"Today, black smoke billowed over Baghdad's skyline as looters set fire to the city's former telephone communications center, apparently as a distraction for others who tried to steal cars nearby.

On the other side of the city, hundreds of looters, who now range through the city every day, poured into a former palace of Saddam Hussein after American military units decided to vacate it.

Baghdad is once again becoming a city of almost hourly eruptions of gunfire. Criminals are shooting at other criminals, officials said. Families are settling scores, and some Iraqis are just taking potshots at American forces."

Even Lt Smash is relieved to hear that Salam Pax has posted on his blog again...

"Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colors of an autumn forest. ...Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire." --Chesterton, quoted by Borges in: Selected Non-Fictions ed. Eliot Weinwerger (1999)

Information is not a mass noun but a count noun. That fact by itself dooms the SuperInfoWay.

Since Americans despise the things they profess to respect--freedom, intelligence, & individuality--the only reason not to be a liar is martyrdom.

Someday it will be understood just as clearly that power & egotism should be kept apart, as kids & guns today.

"Evil" as the shadow cast by the hand of fear in the spotlight of despair.

Refusing to believe in chance is the most subtle, & perhaps the least pernicious, form of denial. But who is there can believe in neither chance nor necessity?

All the practitioners of unpopular arts are like Ed Wood: they have the greatest difficulty just getting people to first take them seriously.

Torture is a Rubicon. --saying of Asmodeus

For a bumpersticker: "GNOSTICS/ Know All the Pass Words."

Cities are the creation of slave societies & they continue to enslave us by the burden of their unquestioned demands.

It may not be strictly true, but it would be very helpful if it were generally believed that you cannot be a poet without reading poetry.

What if poetry readings were completely unscheduled & nobody ever knew when they would hear one again?

'There is no end to the illusions of patriotism.' --Borges

My rejected submission for the Shell-Economist essay contest:

“How Much Freedom Should We Trade for Our Security?”

Synopsis. The author rejecting the terms of the question as inadequate and unhelpful, seeks a formulation that, while radically idealistic, at least represents a step toward acknowledging what we are up against.

Tough times call for tall tires. But it isn’t like we still could choose.

If security were a pure function of armaments and high-tech surveillance; if something that depends on intricate patterns of trust and consent could be boxed, weighed, and placed on the auction block; if our deep-seated will to be isolate agents in a world made for our sole unbridled pounce-chomp-slurp, were anything but sheerest delusion and despair of humanity-- then we could indeed trade five cents of freedom for a nickel’s-worth of security. We could ride on our tall tires. America wants so badly to believe this. And no one we hear will tell us it isn’t so.

This land was taken by force from the first ones who lived here, but all we see in the mirror is our white hat of destiny. We rose to industrial might on the backs of slaves and demi-slaves, but all we see is the frolic of our gadget circus. And while our empire acting like an empire rewarded its allies and punished those who opposed it, we kept on seeing ourselves as the light of the world.

No wonder we don’t understand. Who hates Santa Claus?

And the facts are there, the reality of our deeds can be known--if you try to find out. Right. Watch America reach for the owl-flavored spoon. Not now, and maybe not ever. So sugar rules. And in the name of upholding all we hold dear (which means in effect our fantasies), we have lost or are losing a genuine precious thing, something we haven’t yet once had the wits to celebrate, and something the rest of the world really does have reason to admire, envy, or fear. I mean the openness of our society. Our tolerance, and receptiveness to change.

This accidental fruit of a frontier storming by misfits, this one historical miracle, might be doomed. Just let blinded Polyphemus flail about wildly, let the mad goading of otherwise impotent would-be martyrs continue, and the fear mount, and the media spew its ineluctable blather: it isn’t going to take much to brick up “Fortress America”. But not even the President will sleep secure in such a state. And cameras in the malls will receive the chrism of blood.

Do we want peace? The peace within our grasp is not a matter of military muscle, domestic rigor, or geopolitical clout. The only peace possible is to cease the breeding of hate. And that would be the work of many generations, even if all of us at once could instantly see the need. Vengeance will not end as long as humans remain trapped by their national identities; as long as there are borders, these borders will not be secure. The tall tires of our dreaming have too long kept us from feeling the road, and it is high time we got down and started a different journey, barefoot on the earth, toward peace that all can share. Is this realistic?

Is it realistic to expect the mass of Americans to suddenly start thinking hard about our place in the world, the responsibilities of wielding such unprecedented power, and our share in creating the oppression and mayhem we alone have had the dubious good fortune to be able to ignore till now? Is it realistic to expect our all-blinkered media to shake itself out of its parrot drone of reiterated snap-jabberwocky, and begin to speak honestly of cause and effect? Is it realistic to expects our gamester politicos to summon up enough personal courage to face down the juggernaut of jingoistic self-righteousness that passes for purposeful discourse? And is it realistic to expect the bunch of right-wing zealots, greedheads and corporate lackeys we’ve inadvertantly entrusted our entire future to, to listen and act accordingly?

i myself am not sanguine, but among the ancient gods and goddesses of Greece I think there was one called Nemesis, and her job it was to punish the sins of hubris; and as Carlyle once remarked in a fit of advanced lucidity:

“NO LIE CAN LIVE FOREVER.”

7-21-02

The Surveillance Camera Players like to perform for public cameras.

I am glad to see Crimethink is taking up where Yippie! left off. (I just hope the police are still only using rubber bullets when the party comes to town...)

In case you haven't been keeping up, the Extrasolar Planets Catalogue lists 107 planets that have been discovered outside the Solar System.

I invented a chess opening, the Chenoboskion Variation (named after a key Gnostic archaeological site), & the name is slowly finding its way into the literature...as "Chenoboskian". Oh well.

Someone just bought Saddam Hussein's personal banjo (signed) on eBay--for $15,000.

   "Death of the Great Stone Face"

The geometric tortoise is grave
Flying over fjord
And the thick light of Izdubar, kiln
Acid on my mind:
The sprockets engage with raucous rhyme,
I watch flayed people
Scurry. From what energies I give
Emerges a sigh.
To flourish in dark America
As in porous tomb,
Pungent prophecies with little force
Scads of skalds alone
Peal, rim/ abode & narrow Alcor
Gap ours the lean way
Stirious (this wretched qabbalah)
Down where fulsome faith
Find Cthulhu ftagn in Oz
Crepuscular key.
The carbonaceous gleam throbbing pearl
I insist is form
Enough, wisps away into last math
By a sinking lamp.

Emerald & moth licked anagram,
Profuse aorta
Muezzin out of purlieu one black dove
Against azalea
Glory: & the alibi was Rome
Mutiny demon
They cast out with execrations roach
Hubris alembic
Stayed, filled, terrible verbs did; neon
Blessing what sea.:.? Blood.

Sometimes i think i will end my days writing exclusively in Latin.

"...A flower from its cerulean wall..." --William Cullen Bryant

    "Vanitas

I met you at the parting of the ways,
And I have lingered with you certain days.

Over a little grave I had set a stone:
I had buried love, and I was all alone.

The roadway of the unforgotten past
Ended; the road in front lay vague and vast.

I met you at the parting of the ways,
And I have lingered with you certain days.

Because you took my hand in both your hands,
I think there may be help in other lands.

Because you laid your face against my face,
I wonder if hope lives in any place.

Because you laid my head upon your breast,
I know the earth holds yet a little rest."

Arthur Symons, Lesbia (1920)

    "THESE

Bers phone the the.
Give showed mail ing.
The on won so.
Ly fetch wonders note.
It's a gim, a de.
on the know, the on, the don't.
Back how's is backs.
To one it, it irons.
ops a ed, a are any this.
   Don.

   Trucks one."

Clark Coolidge, Space (1970)
[Tmesis is a resource seldom exploited in poetry, now or ever; Virgilius Maro
pf Toulouse called it ars scissendi, the "art of cutting".

    "Talon on Head

Beauty that tears
And guts to bucket child
On pathways without bird
Or stone-cropped hedge

This, that one that stains
For marchers in step--
Curling for madness dropping
Is quizzical and pure

But quick with movement...
The ardor of grace in doubt
Not hounded--
Simply mobile"

Ovid Neal III, The Dirge of the Thin Air Dancers (Crying Dog Books: 1992)

Starhawk in Palestine.

A corporation (i almost wrote: a Journal) is an intricately interlocking set of bottlenecks, masquerading as a planned order.

Car wrecks are the last bastion of Natural Selection.

In times to come, they will say we lied to our children, wittingly & remorselessly; & this will seem the most terrible thing of a terrible time.

"But we, the cataleptics,
Must venture out alone with our clean
Into what seems a source: the without." --Ovid Neal III

Crash during the night outside my window. I didn't even get up to look.

To speak for the speechless ones: that might be a genre. Another: the pretense of nonventriloquism.

"[Clifford Geertz:] If it rains, the ritual of course is a great success. But it is a success rather more like a successful painting is a success, or a successful production of a play is a success. ...The idea is to form the whole. When everything comes together, when you dance and you make all those long preparations that lead up to it, and then in the end it rains, what is reinforced is your conviction that you really understand what the cosmos is like and that indeed you understand your place and part in it. ...the ritual activity is not conceived as instrumental in the first place." --Jonathan Miller, States of Mind (1983) --my self publishing a chapbook. But how is one nation making war on another, any different?

Art as ritual & as conversation (for the gods; for other humans): egoistic & nonegoistic versions of each. Art as promise & as reinterpretation: & when it connects with other art, the one before becomes the promise; the one after becomes the reinterpretation. Art that exists in & out of History, & Art-history. Art that presupposes a heretical canon. Art about the absence of appropriate æsthetics that should judge it...

"Sed non in requiem pariter cessere tenebrae." --Silius Italicus, Punica xiii, 256 ('But the darkness did not bring the same rest to both armies.')

"Moss can be grown on tops." --Empson

"Hugo never had the good fortune to write a bad book, nor even a single bad line, so not having time to read all, the future will read none." --George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man

'Whoever has no house now, will never have one.' --Rilke

Beautiful Salon story on a play in a ruined theater in Baghdad.

Listening to: Okinawan Pop band, Shoukichi Kina: "Peppermint Tea House" (1994).

How the Next Election will Be Stolen. "Letter from actor Peter Coyote to Senator Barbara Boxer:

Dear Barbara,

I'm writing to you about a situation of the greatest urgency.
Last year, I narrated a film called "Unprecedented" by American journalist
Greg Palast (currently writing for the London Guardian). This film documents
the illegal expunging of 54,000 black and overwhelmingly Democratic voters
from the Florida rolls just before the presidential election. We
interviewed the computer company that did the work, filmed their explanations of
the instructions they received and their admissions that they knew
that their instructions would produce massive error. That figure has now
been revised to 91,000.

Jeb Bush was sued, and was supposed to have returned these
voters to the rolls, and did not, which explains his last re-election. The
Republicans have something far worse in mind for the next presidential
election and Democrats need to be prepared. The recent elections of Nebraska
Republican Chuck Hagel, the loss in Georgia of Max Cleland, wildly popular
Vietnam vet, and the victory of Alabama Governor Bob Riley, along with a
handful of other Republican victories, (all predicted to have been losers by
straw polls which our nation has refined to a high-art) points to an ominous
source: corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting
machine, recording and tabulating ballots.

You'd think in an open democracy that the government--answerable
to all its citizens, rather than a handful of corporate officers and
stockholders--would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd
think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and
their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there
would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if
a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with
computerized vote counts. You'd be wrong.

The Washington, DC publication The Hill has confirmed
that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S.
Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in,
the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely
ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.
When Democrat,Charlie Matulka requested a hand count of the vote in
the election he lost to Hagel, his request was denied because Nebraska had a
just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from
looking at the ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count
votes in Nebraska, he said, are those made and programmed by the
corporation formerly run by Hagel.

When Bev Harris and The Hill's Alexander Bolton pressed the
Chief Counsel and Director of the Senate Ethics Committee, (the man
responsible for ensuring that FEC disclosures are complete), asking him why he'd
not questioned Hagel's 1995, 1996, and 2001 failures to disclose the
details of his ownership in the company that owned the voting machine
company when he ran for the Senate, the Director reportedly met with Hagel's
office on Friday, January 25, 2003 and Monday, January 27, 2003. After the
second meeting, on the afternoon of January 27th, the Director of the
Senate Ethics Committee resigned his job.

Hagel's surprise victory is a trial-run for the presidential
election. Election 'reform' laws are now prohibiting paper ballots (no
trail) and exit polls, effectively removing all trace and record of votes,
making prosecution of voter fraud virtually impossible. For whatever
reasons, the Democrats decided not to pursue the issue of fraudulence in the
last Presidential election. The three Supreme Court Justices who
should have recused themselves (Scalia, Thomas and O'Connor) were allowed to
stand unchallenged and pass a bizarre one-time only ruling. That they
were in place long before the election demonstrates how clearly the
end-game of such moves was thought out.

Unless the issue of voter fraud is elevated to an issue of
national importance, not only is it highly probably that Democrats will
lose again and again, but eventually voters will "sense" even if they
cannot prove, that elections are rigged, and the current 50% of those
boycotting elections will swell to the majority. Privatization of the vote is
tantamount to turning over the control of democracy to the corporate sector. I
urge you to use your considerable powers and influence to address this
issue." (via Buffalo Poetics List)

Zompist compares English as She is Spoke with Babelfish (Yes, Babelfish is worse!)
.

Welcome back, Salam Pax!

The only poem i have been able to find by a Dallas poet contemporaneous with the Kennedy Assassination:

     "The Spell

You can almost see him, looking as if well,
Shedding it, shaking it off,
The least shadow on the shoulders
Marking the hurt--as if absorbed almost;
Then the face turning, alive--

Only hesitating momentarily--

Until you remember how the head
Was horribly shattered
And fell, with the lifted hair,
As from an ax in back--Oswald
Cutting a path for himself
In the midst of America, a wedge;

But was the thing as it sped,
Coppered, leaden, not stopped
Perhaps there in the invincible thick hair?
Where the woman with her skill
Could pick it away, in her lap,
Breaking the spell? in the cloth of her dress--

It was deeper than that;
Neither burr nor dune thistle,
Nor like the roses she held
Black as blood in the light, so dark red--
But a kind of blunt bud, splintered
Into flower, that could not be touched,
Having its own final force that spread throughout,
The blind dark overwhelming him."

William Burford, A Beginning (1966)

The myth of Unity is the child of despair. --sayings of Asmodeus

Love is a destroyer of worlds, & the passport to all worlds. --This is not two secrets about love, but one.

"Rabbits live in our air so why not portrait busts?" --Gerald Burns in Probability and Fuzzy Dice

"Every lissom overture of the malaise pleased me." --Tanith Lee, The Secret Books of Paradys I & II (1988)

"When asked why he wrote in a dead language, [Isaac Bashevis] Singer said he was wont to reply that he wrote mostly about ghosts, and that is what ghosts speak, a dead language." --Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in NYT Book R 1-8-95;

"A print run for a book of poems in Irish is between 1,000 and 1,500 copies." --ibid [total # native speakers is about 60,000, or 2% of Ireland's pop.]

Alkaloids are Mt Olympus. --sayings of Asmodeus

'At the time of the revolutionary uprising in Dresden, he [Bakunin] proposed that they should set up Raphael's Madonna in ront of the struggling revolutionaries, in the belief that the army would not bring itself to fire upon it.' --Berdyaev, The Russian Idea (1947)

"This is what the great voice does for us. It rarely astonishes our ears. It illumines our souls, as you see the lightning make the unintelligible craving darkness leap into long mountain ridges, and twisting vales, and spires of cities, and inner recesses of light within light, rose-like, toward a central core of violet heat." --George Meredith, Vittoria

Despair is a concrete-eating termite.

"...I have loved airs that die
Before their charm is writ
Along a liquid sky
Trembling to welcome it." --Robert Bridges

"A discouraging number of reputable poets are sane beyond recall." --E B White

It makes no more sense to want to become one's work than to want to turn into a doorknob.

Art eludes the artist as much as the critic.

'My flesh is combustible and my conscience dark;
my passions ephemeral and sharp, glitter
like the shards of bottle glass that bristled
on the henyard wall to keep out cats and thieves.' --Ramón López Velarde, quoted in: Octavio Paz, The Siren and the Seashell, tr L Kemp & M S Peden (1976)

"It might be difficult to form an interspecies republic." --Writer's Guide to Creating a Science Fiction Universe

"Tennyson read Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, and thought him 'a kind of moralist,' though his subjects, he allowed, are shocking." --William Allingham in: Tennyson, Interviews & Recollections (1983)

"Kipling's death in 1936 coincided with King George V's. There was another less noticed death at the time--that of Saklatvala, an Indian Parsee who had become the Communist MP for Battersea. It so happened that Kipling's cremation followed Saklatvala's, and at the crematorium there was no time to clear away the Red Flag and other communist insignia set up for Saklatvala. Truly God is not mocked." --Malcolm Muggeridge, Things Past: An Anthology (1978)

'I write down
the ideograms for "youth"
feeling uneasy
about the preponderance
of horizontal striokes.' --Tawara Machi, Salad Anniversary

Dreamed i was in my parents' old house, & a helicopter crashed into the house behind us. When i called the fire department, i got an answering machine. So i left a message & went back to what i was doing.

A short history of blogs.

A curious episode in the recent history of Lojban was the Hexadecimalist Heresy. A certain Lojbanist, observing that Lojban had single-syllable words for numbers up to fifteen, maintained that the default number base of Lojban must be Base-16 (i.e. counting ...8, 9, A=10, B=11, C=12, D=13, E=14, F=15, "10"=16 in conventional notation). This created an immense & vituperative controversy, only ending when the arch-hexidecimalist withdrew from the community. Lojban remains default-decimal today, but in the imaginary city of Lojbanistan called "La Xagvar", where nonconforming Lojbanists are said to congregate, it is still the customary greeting to ask, "What base do you count in?"

'The Ornamented Zither

The ornamented zither, for no reason, has fifty strings.
Each string, each bridge, recalls a youthful year.
Master Chuang was confused by his morning dream of the butterfly;
Emperor Wang's amorous heart in spring is entrusted to the cuckoo.
In the vast sea, under a bright moon, pearls have tears;
On Indigo Mountain, in the warm sun, jade engenders smoke.
This feeling might have become a thing to be remembered,
Only, at the time you were already bewildered and lost.'

--James J. Y. Liu, The Poetry of Li Shang-yin (1969)

'...I believe that poetry (especially lyric poetry) should not flow like water over a waterfall and be a poet's daily occupation.' --Akhmatova

"And bough-crossed skies of flame, like that which quivers
Wistfully just before a winter's night." --H.P. Lovecraft, Fungi from Yuggoth, xxiii

"A very good corrective to the Aeneid is, I think, the Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln." --Frank O. Copley

"The common [cockroach] species Periplaneta americana becomes active soon after dark each day and scavenges continually for five or six hours, but if one has its head cut off, it no longer shows this circadian rhythm of activity. Not surprising, perhaps; but in fact if the head is removed surgically and precautions are taken to keep the insect from bleeding to death, it survives for several weeks. A headless cockroach eventually starves to death, but while it lives, it continues to move in a random and desultory fashion. Janet Harker found that she could give a cockroach back its sense of direction by a process of transfusion. All insects have very rudimentary circulatory systems, in which blood just washes around in the body cavity bathing the internal organs. One individual can be made to share its blood with another by simply cutting a hole in the body wall of each and connecting them together with a short glass tube. Harker solved the problem of differences of opinion by an ingenious if somewhat gruesome compromise. She strapped the blood donor upside down on the back of the headless cockroach and cut off the upper one's legs to prevent it kicking and upsetting the weird combination. Paired like this in parabiosis (which means living side by side) the double-bodied cockroach with one head and one set of legs functioned almost normally." --Lyall Watson, Supernature (1973)

   More from Festus:

I should like to macadamize the world;
The road to Hell wants mending.

Yet truth and falsehood meet in seeming, like
The falling leaf and shadow on the pool’s face.

Oh! I should love to die. What is to die?
I cannot hold the meaning more than can
An oak’s arms clasp the blast that blows on it.

The wild and winged desires, youth’s saurian schemes,
Which creep and fly by turns; which kill, and eat,
And do disgorge each other...

Respect is what we owe; love what we give,
And men would mostly rather give than pay.

...--Man, alas! alone,
The recreant spirit of the universe,
Contemns the operations of the light;
Loves surface-knowledge; calls the crimes of crowds
Virtue: adores the useful vices; licks
The gory dust from off the feet of war,
And swears it food for gods, though fit for fiends...

Then let the mad world fight its shadow down;
There soon will be nor sun, nor world, nor shadow.

...What are years to me?
Traitors! that vice-like fang the hand ye lick:
Ye fall like small birds beaten by a storm
Against a dead wall, dead.

Yes, wandering fires wait even on rottenness
Like a stray gleam of thought in an idiot’s brain.

Love is the art of hearts and heart of arts.
Conjunctive looks and interjectional sighs
Are its vocabulary’s greater half.

The worm shall trail across thine unsunned sweets,
And fatten him on that men pined to death for;
Yea, have a further knowledge of thy beauties
Than ever did thy best-loved lover dream of.

The grey gull balanced on her bowlike wings,
Between two black waves seeking where to dive.

These cursed joys my soul now writhes among,
Like to a half-crushed reptile on a rose...

...The sphinx-like heart,
Consistent in its inconsistency,
Loathes life the moment that life’s riddle is read:
The knot of our existence is untied,
And we lie loose and useless. Life is had;
And then we sigh, and say, can this be all?

"Many Mansions

The last majority attained,
And shut from its small house of dust,
Into the heritage of air
The spirit goes because it must:
And halts before the multiple plane
To look more ways than left and right,
And weeping walks its father's house
Like something homeless in the night:
For now less largely let abroad,
Though but the world they say is mine,
I shiver as I take the road."

Léonie Adams

Excerpts from the 1847 edition of Festus by Philip James Bailey:

...Death does his work
In secret and in joy intense, untold,
As though an earthquake smacked its mumbling lips
O’er some thick peopled city.

This is to be a mortal and immortal!
To live within a circle,--and to be
That dark point where the shades of all things around
Meet, mix and deepen.

...To blow
A kiss, a bubble and a prayer hath like
Effect and satisfaction.

So I betook me to the sounding sea;
And overheard its slumberous mutterings
Of a revenge on man; whereat almost
I gladdened, for I felt savage as the sea.

The science of the future is to man
But what the shadow of the wind might be.

Most men glide quietly and deeply down:
Some seek the bottom like a cataract.

Ye hate the truth as snails salt--it dissolves ye...