L. Cohen to P. Ayer

A crooked smile.

As for the songs, "I’ve always held the song in high regard," he says, "because songs have got me through so many sinks of dishes and so many humiliating courting events." Sometimes, he goes on, holding me with his commanding eloquence, his ill-shaven baritone compounded of Gauloises, Courvoisier and a lifetime of late nights, he’ll catch a snatch of one of his songs on the radio, "and I’ll think: these songs are really good. And it’s really wonderful that they have been written, and more wonderful that they should have found a place in the heart. And sometimes I’ll hear my voice, and I think: this guy has got to be the great comedian of his generation. These are hilarious: hilariously inept, hilariously solemn and out of keeping with the times; hilariously inappropriate."

A line he’s used for years. . .

Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den

The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den (simplified Chinese: 施氏食狮史; traditional Chinese: 施氏食獅史; pinyin: Shī Shì shí shī shǐ) is a famous example of constrained writing by Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982) which consists of 92 characters, all with the sound shi in different tones when read in Mandarin.

The text, although written in Classical Chinese, can be easily comprehended by most educated readers. However, changes in pronunciation over 2,500 years resulted in a large degree of homophony in Classical Chinese, so the poem becomes completely incomprehensible when spoken in Modern Standard Chinese or when written in romanization.


In pinyin:

« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì. « Shi Shy shyi shi she »



In English:

Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den

In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o'clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.

"Last year's words belong to last year's language, and next year's words await another voice."—T. S. Eliot

— Teju Cole (@tejucole) December 26, 2011

Faces In the Puddle

It is 1023 and raining on the cottage huts and monastery tops of Kenjimonde. A young monk
the other brothers have
named The Smoker is kneeling, splashing his face in a puddle. The cortege of the abbott happens
to pass by,
two or three monks hiking umbrellas over the Old Man's head. "What good does it do, young
sprout," the abbott
asks, to much laughter, "to wash one's face in a rainstorm?" "Oh, all the
difference,
Abba," The Smoker
says, rubbing his face furiously with freshly and again freshly fallen water. "Clarity requires I
wash
not only a dirty face, but a clean one. And once that's done, to scoop from the wealth of my reflection
and
wash it as well." Effortless words. But given the young man speaks so openly, does it constitute an admission,
a gentle flick, or a form
of challenging encouragement? As they look over his shoulder, the answer seeks
focus. So many
more faces in the puddle.


*

A thief with a knife in his side sidles up to the bar. It's already past high moon and the patrons
are Anglo
and Saxonly drunk. "A draught here, a man's bleeding to death," the thief says, "something
to plug
the wound!" "Make it two," shouts the wound. Muffled between the thief's pressed fingers,
"I'm dying of
this man around me." The barman and everyone marvels from stoops and benches. "Hush
now," the
thief chides his side. "You've got the knife you were always asking for." The wound
bubbles
its hilt truly with the ease of a sword-swallower. The whole blade nowhere except on the
thief's face,
where it yelps right off his pocked pallor. "Never you worry, I've got money," it assures
him. "I'll
pay for my draught and yours. Just be my face here this once and you can get drunk on my
shilling." The thief
wrenches the hilt with both hands and sneers. "Oh like my ears haven't heard that before."



*

A parking garage in a mid-sized city, the American South. Two college boys and a squatter
punk, his
girlfriend. Met on South Limestone where the dirty couples panhandle. Instead giving away a
few clean
dollars the clean kids offer to buy passage to a movie at the old historical theater downtown. The girl
brings
her pet
kitten. Sneaks it past the box office tucked in her jacket. During the movie they stink so bad the
boys can't
forget one second they belong in college. What's the movie? Some frivolous drama a comedy
with
curled toes, an action flick with too much sound not enough explosions? They laugh at the spots
that make sense
to the plot. To his left, the younger of the boys watches the girl hold the kitten on her knees. Feeds it popcorn.
Innocently, a
baby zombie, it gnaws that brain like a kernel. In screenlight the girl is Japanese amused and beyond
either their
previous definitions of beauty. Her boyfriend toughly sensitive by way of touch, just like misfits in the
50's. With a
straw doubled up pinched between fingers he etches dried dirt from her bootsoles. Afterwards they
step in
separate breaths and bring the cold along, up the walk back to the garage's third floor. At their car
the boys ask
where do you want to go? The girl, though, not there when they look around. A trickling echo
brings the younger
one around the car. And there she is, beautiful, suddenly of mere earth and frankly significant:
crouched
cuddling her kitten to chest with pants around her ankles. Urine in a thick trickle trails gravity's
contour past her
shadow. Towards him quickly enough he leaps both feet apart to let it pass. Gatorade yellow,
full of light
it fuses to carry his eyes along with it. Almost now, twenty years ago.

John McLaughlin on Bill Evans:

"Bill really blew my mind. His delicacy is beyond strength or weakness..."

Ernest Becker

"As ritual is an organization for life, it has to be carried out according to a particular theory of prosperity--that is, how exactly to get nature to give more life to the tribe. The most striking thing to us about the primitive theory of prosperity is how elemental it was--or organic, as we would say today. Primitive man observed nature and tried to discern in it what made the dance of life--where the power came from, how things became fecund. If you are going to generate life, you have to determine its principles and imitate the things that embody them."

Weldaghost

She dreamt that she saw it, and when she opened her eyes it was almost true, the house
she'd fallen
asleep in was gone forever. As if it had decayed while she was away and went the fast way of
last year's snow.
No bed beneath her, no pillow to hug against her head. Pine needles and twigs and stripped
bark. Evergreens
arrowing out of the earth and playing frail voodoo with the overfed, cattle clouds. The sun
already setting
along the knife-light of the mountains. She had been dreaming she was walking in such-and-such
a place,
as if a pickup had run out of gas miles and years behind her, and instead of the obvious, following
the road
she was on, for fear or impatience she stepped into the woods and tracked the long shadow that
walked a few
paces beyond her. In the pine barren boil around her, birds and not a sound, then clear
calls and
no birds. Albino moss, ferns like enormous exit wounds. A chill of something bearded with
no eyes
standing between birches. Back when she had a house she'd heard stories from people who'd had
girlhoods. Tall tales
overgrown like fingernails. Tubers so long and bloodless and twisted they braided into a mesh
you could
catch sparrows or flies in. Out beyond the hunting camps, beyond the branch cairns that appeared
overnight
and no one knew why, there was some kind of new mammal, some horror on two legs wearing a
suit of
human hair. No evidence, but people just knew it. No children gone missing only to appear weeks
later like
something
chewed pressed to a windshield. Dozens of turkey hunters hadn't seen it. The ranger boy in his
fire tower
had never managed to spot it cresting a far hill. Without any credible visage to aim their fears at
they
went on talking it about it anyway, building it up, feeding it, describing it, dressing it with so many
naked descriptions
the dim, collective thousands out there in the wilder parts began to come together, bond like fat
clucks of
mercury, and spin flesh and bone around the skein they were imagining. A Weldaghost hadn't
breathed snout
or set paw in that country until they'd fed it, patiently and foolishly, like parents fashioning a
golem from
a stillborn. Then chickens did get threshed. Cattle did burst their bellies. Snakes did hang from the
lowest branches
in stripped rows. Only the unimaginative, the least superstitious were spared. Literal as potatoes
miles away
from the nearest knife, they tallied the dead and didn't blame it on some mythological scourge, some
Grendel
of the American hills. They told the law, "killers, escape convicts maybe" and cut the treelines with
their floodlights
with skeptically loaded calm. Wherever they looked for months was down the barrel of a gun. No
beast stepped
to fill its silhouette. The folks who talked courted it, what they thought. The people who didn't leave
moved to
town and watched more television. They kept themselves busy wearing a culture crown. If they forgot,
who could tell
but their roosters, slaughtered into separate wings in a stable. Next to three dead mares and a bucket
of chunky milk
kicked over. She'd been the last to believe and the last to leave, and on the night she'd packed her
stuff and
forced every inch of her car to hold it, there'd been this dream, and in her sleep she went to it, and
spun like
light around its spindle she'd come out the other side and instead of new morning and a road out
she found
brittle leaves clinging with fugue static to her nightgown. Her place was long gone, the forest was
all around. Must have
been what the earliest settlers must have felt, when their tents split and in that instant their dying
fires went out.
She sat up and let the dark take account. Barefoot, skin like a kite of moonlight, white as a white
girl can get
without showing every sinew underneath, each rib and between them the slick throb of organs. So
dark any
bit of light moved like sound. So the frost wore snail teeth and button wet of nearby eyes felt her
through the
acoustics of the hour. Maybe three, four in the morning. Or three, four at night. Those hours less
than late and
more than early. Everything out there could hurt her, but only if she walked or sat still. If she could
keep on
dreaming, maybe she would already know the way back, though there was nothing left of home.
She tried to
blink but couldn't. Good evidence she was dreaming. So she stood up and got going. Up the far
bank, over
rock locks and under roots of holler. The swarm of one element around her, fractally spinning off
trees and
dry bushes and boulders. At the third crest of the third hill, in a crackle of mud broken fresh under
a heavy foot, she
turned and saw it: a hun hulk of something big and straw-bound and dirty. The air coming off of it
anal and
rancid. Too exposed without a sleepwalker's drugged sense of stealth, she stood and took it and
fed it
the passive five feet of her weak presence. But nothing moved. It didn't see or show her. Rather
was busy
doing something involved and woebegone to the thick side of a great tree. Spelling its bowels?
Scratching a
rash? No, a trick of light off her own skin showed her. The two-armed, two-legged thing was
threshing
the tough bark off, tossing lengths of it to the ground. Fifteen minutes of that and it paused as if
some impulse
inside it was done. Then did one small thing she would never forget and which was the sole
witness she brought
back with her to this land where civilization thunders: pressed its whole face, snout, maw and all
to the tender
unborn bark beneath. Now why would it do that, she wondered even then but years later. If
underneath all that there was
nothing to kill or chase or eat. Crouching there, almost ashamed, almost as if it were
hiding from something.

The Lantau Rope

It could very well be raining this morning halfway across the world on Lantau Island, driblets
weeping off the
magnificent bronze pate of the Tian Tan Buddha. Like some choice filling wrenched from the
open mouth
of an ancient, widespread humanely decaying religion. Where he once was in the firmament of
the living and
dead equally, now he occupies a crystal nod to fear, a psychological grip of some
consistently disappearing
rope. It didn't fall from the sky, though that fact didn't manage to stop millions from climbing it.
Nor did it
wiggle out of the earth like a cobra bellydancing on the wavelength of a flute. The rope was born
when they were
and remained well-hidden until one day they took a look at their X-rays
or spied
photographs
of what a person's inner calcium looks like disrobed. Flesh gone, skin, muscle and viscera.
The rope, to
their surprised eye, was there all along. For each a spine that climbs them and which holds them
aloft
like figments of fulfilled gravity. Lying to dredge sleep, they held it lateral above the below
of them. As they
sat up, curved it like space-time in the presence of superior density. But the finest moment
was when
they sent the rope climbing, up a ladder, a flight of stairs, a length of its knotted namesake out there
in the surmountable commotion.
The Buddha was an elegant solution, an intuitive and precise way of talking to it. A choice example
of vigilant ease
and the measuring of fate with awareness. How many saw the huge buddha on his stupa, surrounded
by vegetation
that thrived and fed from the sun in cycles? One among many islands at various distances from the
panicked navel
of Hong Kong? Statues of beings that may not have even lived live more vividly once they've mixed
the seen and
the believed behind both eyes. Not one or the other: both. Because the bridge of the nose, the
cartilage above breath
divides them.

No Idle Science

No really, the man at the party, the man with the wine, the man with the wine at the party
said
we'd gone far enough to figure that out. We had the statistical models for it so all it took
was
some measurements of the different variables--the size of the snowflake, how recently
it'd been
formed, how high the cloud was from the ground. And also: how fast the cloud was moving
and also:
in which direction, and how close it was to its adjacent clouds. Believe it or not, once we
started collecting
the data, a bunch of other variables popped up and suddenly mattered, ones we couldn't
have dreamed
would matter until we got down into the thick of considering all the relevant factors to be
taken into account
when calculating exactly how quickly a single snowflake will dissolve on asphalt when it lands.
Is it a road
or a driveway, where it lands? When was the last time a set of wheels cut across it? The most
absurd details
suddenly offset our calculations by minutes, not even seconds. Was anyone looking when it
trickled down
from miles up to stop in a wet peck on the blacktop? If so, were they looking from the comfort
of a warm room
or out in an attack shock of zero cold? If from the former, which room? Bedroom? Living room?
Kitchen? Foyer?
Or could it be from the amniotic mobility of a defrosted and idling car? A nod to Einsteinian
space-time
here... Snow that is observed from a warm interior will appear to move faster than if the same
were to be seen
rolling through a spare chill. The observed and observer then not only share a common climate
but are if you
can believe it, far out as it sounds, a unified, clarifying action. The panoramic velocity of
perceived quiet, as if
they were either both standing still and watching or both falling without consciousness of the
ground. We initially
were pretty full of ourselves, you could say. We thought the usual particularities would be enough
of a headstart--
height, weight, velocity, dimensions of the frozen ice, temperature of the air and the flake. Oh man
how wrong
we were. In the end you know what we had to do? We had to walk out there and lay with our backs
to the ground
and watch literally hundreds of thousands of them come down before we realized that kind of thing
was too
common to be predicted. I mean, have you ever seen a single one of them fall, all alone? No, not even
one can't make its
way down without synching up with all these millions of distinct mutations, and each one unstitching
the open bulk
above and around you. There's so much information there, it'd take a system the size of the world
to process it.
Instead of calling it a computer, at this point I guess it would be better to call it god.

Funny you should ask...

http://www.tejucole.com/other-words/small-fates/

Question

What is donkey math?

Question

"A pox on all your houses." What kind--chicken?

Question

What are toupees called in the Czech Republic?

Question

What is "full honkey"?

"How To Be A Poet" by Wendell Berry

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Nightwill (stories 2011)

The Smoke Leper /1
Village, Meadow, Tree & Trial /5
Three Mountains /11
Nightwill /15
The Late Master /20
The Death of the Copyeditor /24
A Thing About Mouths /26
The Lucky Body /30
This Way Between Men /34
Mandeville /39
Spring In Zurveyta /53

Zadig's Way (poems 2011)

Zadig's Way /1
One Of Them Was H.G. Adler /2
Stories On The Half Shell /3

The Gates of Fact /7
For The Skull of Adalbert Czaptienonesz /9
Gray's Low /11
A Tale of Two Hospitals /13
Russians and Men /15
On the Corner of 4th and Breath /16
The Dogs of Tachi /17
B.O.H. /18
The Lives of Modern Lovers /19
For Romy Haag To Her Audience (As She Sings) /20
Two Streams /21
Poor in Flesh /23
Murder Ballad /24
The Best Way /26
Reparation /27
The Circadian Pariah /28
Quincunx The Demon /29
Sea To The Thieves /30
Fire From Water /32

Cock in Water /34
A Plate of Ten Thousand Children /35
Kawabata's Bones /36
If They Should Think Ill of Her /37
Revelations in Joanna /38
Like Suicide Healers /39
La Jollans /40
Some Words From The Risen Old /41
Exchange Rate /42
Like Eyelashes on Water /43
Double Aged Amour /44
Ann In Key of Carter /45
The Genealogy of Horrors /47
Four Tunnels /49
The Tao of Social Strategy /51
Consolation (Without A Compass) /52
Machine Breath /54

One For Aaron /56

Verseworms /62
The Monster of La Mancha /63
Double Nursery /64
Blues For Our Buddy Grub Huck /65
Yet Another Odysseus /66
These Facial Letters /68
Blown Job /69
Holy Michaela /70
Ancient Grease /71
Top Three /72
Real Life in the Gray Market /73
The Resurrection of the Guillotine Is A Koan /76

Excerpts From The Minor Ape /78

Another one for Sunday breakfast. Play it loud & be willing, very willing, to close your eyes, to lean in, & forget everything but the one before you

Bowerbirds - Tuck the Darkness In by The 405

1.27.45

The historian of useless details says: yes I remember. One of my eyes was present at the execution of Herr Schwartzkauld. The historian says: it was quite cold that day. All the people present as witnesses wore gloves. There were half a dozen American soldiers and two Polish prisoners and a mound of bodies set off between two of the barracks but within sight. The man with a star on his helmet turned to Herr Schwartzkauld, who we heard had not committed so many crimes himself but had ordered others to do so, and blowing warm clouds in his ear said, “Do you have any last words?” Herr Schwartzkauld did not understand the language but there was another man, a man without a star on his helmet, who understood how to say this in a way Herr Schwartzkauld could understand. This was the German language. Haben Sie irgendwelche letzten Worte? As the translator spoke clouds foamed around his mouth as well. But Herr Schwartzkauld was by disposition a reticent man, unaccustomed to speaking except when there was some order to be issued. Since he was now in the unfamiliar position of receiving orders he had no language with which to respond. His silence though was accepted as consent for what was about to happen. A noose swung from a wooden crossbeam where one of the soldiers had flung it. They tied its loose end around the axle of a jeep. Some men must be killed in order to meet their conscience, the man with the star on his helmet would write later in his book about the invasion of the enemy homeland and the liberation of the camps. Not that it is my place to have an opinion, says the historian of details, but what could possibly be further from the truth? Isn’t that what living is for? To stand one more afternoon in the cold surrounded by these strangers, your conquerors, but also at a very frank level your fellow men? To shiver and notice them shivering, to say “cold”, to learn each other’s word for that and share it across both tongues? The clouds around their mouths are breath and their breath keeps clouding what they say. It’s worth noting, if he, Herr Schwartzkauld, had lived he might have noticed these things.

Xiu Xiu - Bog People

Listen carefully . . .

BOWIE WROTE THIS AFTER IGGY POP HALLUCINATED THAT HIS T.V. WAS EATING HIS GIRLFRIEND

Gone Home

Let's face it. The stars are unkempt,
flung across sky
(in joy, I think)
and landed soft,
rather than gambled.

O to trust the world's terrain and tackle
the way sky itself was trusted
when it was blank enough
to become blanket.

I know I wasn't thinking much--
but now that my stars are thrown,
fear like a bacteria, fear like a mother
births a new man out of an old, killed man.

That nothing fatherly in me wants to trust,
perfectly, means I risk entire
landscapes, right, means horizon's gambled . . .

I don't know and I'm
at the door and don't know
what's behind -- let's let go now:
this kind of forgetting is a form of building sky.

Then the children tumbling toward me away.

Hopscotch To Oblivion (Barcelona, Spain)

BEHOLD:

A tambourine has never made me so happy:

Still digging this:

Reading

Jim Harrison's food writing will lead to

10 pounds of fat this winter

&

1000 pounds of joy

Father's Sonnet

Mechanic's hours and grocery aisles. The
laundry, the wine, and the in-laws. Rainwater.
Eggs. Tylenol. Oh broad and unreasonable
swaths of life, I want more
goddamn grace, more grace. She is finally
a ballet, a stumbling near-language.
She will say the world soon
the way no one ever exactly
has. And the boy, her brother,
colors his way into corners
only to backflip out, crawing --
like a crow sketching
a broad, imaginary chest.
The only thing that could ruin
the good, grabbed, goosefleshed world
is the too loud voice uttering
the wrong word, wrong time
from me, Fatherhood Unfurling.
And you ask me why I call poetry
the most practical art, prayer's
pushup, and you ask me why
I sing a blues of not singing it
while washing my hands, my cups, my eyes.
The sink fills up, splashes, spills
as a speech that risks more than the silence, too,
that kills.

Nabokov on Gogol

"The Russian who thinks Turgenev was a great writer, and bases his notion of Pushkin upon Chaikovsky's vile libretti, will merely paddle into the gentlest wavelets of Gogol's mysterious sea and limit his reaction to an enjoyment of what he takes to be whimsical humor and colorful quips. But the diver, the seeker of black pearls, the man who prefers the monsters of the deep to the sunshades on the beach, will find in The Overcoat shadows linking our state of existence to those other states and modes which we dimly apprehend in our rare moments of irrational perception. The prose of Pushkin is three-dimensional; that of Gogol is four-dimensional, at least. He may be compared to his contemporary, the mathematician Lobachevsky, who blasted Euclid and discovered a century ago many of the theories which Einstein later developed. If parallel lines do not meet it is not because meet they cannot, but because they have other things to do. Gogol's art as disclosed in The Overcoat suggests that parallel lines not only may meet, but that they can wriggle and get most extravagantly entangled, just as two pillars reflected in water indulge in the most wobbly contortions if the necessary ripple is there. Gogol's genius is exactly that ripple..."

". . . Jim Harrison's belief that . . .

a writer is someone who 'consciously or unconsciously takes a vow of obedience to awareness'" is

(a) true

(b) false

(c) golden

(d) bloodset

Bruce

Gillian

American Writing Today: A Diagnosis of the Disease, by William Vollmann

Approximately 90% of neoplasms originate within 2
cm of the anterior midline of the mouth.
--Dr. Rodney Million and Dr.
Nicholas J. Cassisi, Management of
Head and Neck Cancer: A
Multidisciplinary Approach
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1984), p.251.



AS THIS QUOTATION SHOWS, the mouth is a veritable fount of pestilence, vomiting forth its unclean words to infect all who are not armored with ignorance and earwax. Worse still is when the virus is sealed into a cartridge, positioned with a click of the pen-button, and squeezed through the ball-point onto a sheet of permanence, where spores of words wait gleefully for library centuries until they can attack new victims. Of course there are also saintly books which heal us with word-light; yet these are now sparse. Indeed, the American scene suffers from a plague of writers careless and even putrid. With the assistance of many learned doctors of oral and anal health, I now propose to set forth our responsibility, and some rules for reform.
This first requires that I set right all the woes of the world.


THE FAILURE OF AMERICAN SOCIETY

It is a commonplace that our United States are in decline. On the part of our government we have at best a shortsighted reactive strategy to specific events, lacking in any vision which might influence basic causes. As for the governed, our apathy and misinformation grow hourly. The terrifying increase in random violence and racism of all colors bespeaks a nation polarized halfway to impotence. From homelessness to schools where nothing is taught, from impending environmental disaster to continued environmental assault, our failures illuminate us as Selves incapable of comprehending others.
Our policy toward Nicaragua demonstrates that we cannot put ourselves in a Nicaraguan's shoes. Our laughable War On Drugs does not address the question of why people use drugs, or what people might do instead. Our suppression of abortion is not even hypocritical; it is simply, astoundingly, blind. And we truly have the "leadership" we deserve, for when we see the Other, what do we do?--Suppose that you do not rent whores, and a whore approaches you in the night-lit street, brave and desperate. Suppose that a member of some cult sets out to convert you. Suppose that someone begs you for money.--No, suppose simply that someone sits down beside you in your subway car and begins to talk to you. In how many cases will you answer?


THE FAILURE OF HUMANITY

To fail this test is only human. But survival and happiness depend on knowledge. And knowledge can only be obtained through openness, which requires vulnerability, curiosity, suffering.
The vicious Christian ignoramuses who are determined to end abortions in our country are cousins to the Muslims who preach murder, the Maoists who restore order in China beneath their tank-treads, the terrorists who shoot tourists in Peru or Sri Lanka. These will have their day, because they use force. But ultimately they will be defeated by force, and it will be a force they do not know. Why? Precisely because they will not know the Other. As long as they do not know it, how can they guard against it?
We must take care not to be like them. How can we best do this? By knowing them. By understanding without approving or hating. By empathizing.
How best to do this?


THE GLORIOUS ICE-CREAM BAR

Through art.*

[* Here one might argue that it would be more efficient simply to be GOD, or failing that, to join the CIA. However, the first is not within our power. As for the second, it has now been established that our spooks are wrong as often as our meteorologists.]


A RHAPSODY OF DESSERTS

Art takes us inside other minds, like a space capsule swooping down across Jupiter while the passengers can see strangeness and newness through the portholes, meanwhile enjoying all the comforts of Standard Temperature and Pressure.
Of all the arts, although photography presents best, painting and music convey best, and sculpture looms best, I believe that literature articulates best.


THE PRESCRIPTION (WHICH MUST INEVITABLY SOUND DULL, LIKE A DOCTOR'S COMMAND TO TAKE MORE EXERCISE)

We need writing with a sense of purpose.


GENERIC DRUGS REJECTED

What about beautifully useless books, like the French Maldoror?--They too have their place. But there is too much writing, nowadays that is useless WITHOUT being beautiful.--On the other side are those scarcely mentionable works which strive to be useful and fail in proportion to be beautiful: "socialist realism." In our own country we rarely fall into that mistake, but it does happen, as in the spots where The Grapes of Wrath is mildewed.
In this period of our literature we are producing mainly insular works, as if all our writers were on an airplane in economy seats, beverage trays shading their laps, face.- averted from one another, masturbating furiously. Consider, for instance, the New Yorker fiction of the past few years, with those eternally affluent characters suffering understated melancholies of overabundance. Here the Self is projected and replicated into a monotonous army which marches through story after story like deadly locusts. Consider, too, the structuralist smog that has hovered so long over our universities, permitting only games of stifling breathlessness. (The so-called New Historicism promises no better.)
So how ought writers fulfill their role, and accomplish something?


THE RULES

1. We should never write without feeling.
2. Unless we are much more interesting than we imagine we are, we should strive to feel not only about Self, but also about Other. Not the vacuum so often between Self and Other. Not the unworthiness of Other. Not the Other as a negation or eclipse of Self. Not even about the Other exclusive of Self, because that is but a trickster-egoist's way of worshiping Self secretly. We must treat Self and Other as equal partners. (Of course I am suggesting nothing new. I do not mean to suggest anything new. Health is. more important than novelty.)
3. We should portray important human problems.
4. We should seek for solutions to those problems. Whether or not we find them, the seeking will deepen the portrait.
5. We should know our subject, treating it with the respect with which Self must treat Other. We should know it in all senses, until our eyes are bleary from seeing it, our ears ring from listening to it, our muscles ache from embracing it, our gonads are raw from making love to it. (If this sounds pompous, it is perhaps because I wear thick spectacles.)
6. We should believe that truth exists.
7. We should aim to benefit others in addition to ourselves.

Blown Job

What will be done tonight?
Outside, so much
birthday weather. So many cases of
.........owl mouth
in loud house. Lusciously
undressed from luck

like an unhurried sinner,
I see you (or is that
just her talking
to her own private B.J. in the mirror?)
There are no B.J.s in the mirror.
All jobs are blown,
or none are. Nothing

in your life will say this
like the bible. Ecclesiastes,
for one. Two hundred
.........thirty-two
B.J.s in Ecclesiastes. Why else
so much monolithic
bitterness? Two hundred
.........thirty-two
B.J.s in Ecclesiastes. Everything in

our mortal array
thrown together and blown
into the hardcore endgame of a job.
Or was it Job? A Blown Job?
Now that's something
we haven't read about

but can understand.

Reality Poetry 1

STRONGSVILLE, Ohio -- The manager of a cell phone store in Ohio called 911 to report a gorilla had been attacked by a banana.

The Wireless Center in Strongsville, near Cleveland, advertises at curbside with a man in a gorilla suit. Manager Brandon Parham said he was watching last week as a kid dressed as a banana emerged from some bushes and took a flying leap at the store mascot.

Parham said the attacker looked like a Spartan from the movie "300" - except he was a banana.

The gorilla was knocked down but got back up, adjusted his head and went back to work.

WJW-TV reported the banana split - running down the street with other teens.

Dear Approximately 80-year-old Self

One day, when your voice is finally
the color of coffee,
and everything you love
has died,
you will get in a . . .

To be continued...

Empathy: A Dress Rehearsal w/ Market Research

My neighbor just pulled into his driveway.
He was about a quarter of the way through "Land Down Under."
I was reading an article about the fact that most websites are
designed with a masculine
aesthetic. I stopped reading when I realized that
my neighbor didn't cut his engine. Instead,
he had made the conscious choice to wait out
the song. In fact, he turned it up,
hotboxing himself with the music.

The masculine design aesthetic of most websites
doesn't jive with the fact that
more females than males
use websites for online shopping.
The designers can't change what, to them,
is inherent and intuitive. Even though they are
paid to check that kind of shit
at the door.

I get it. I really do. The personal
is even more powerful
than we want to imagine,
even in a commoditized world.

Which leads me to the waking dream
of what could possibly lead a man,
circa 2011,
to put off all the other things,
all the better things,
all the family things,
all the urgent and important things,
all the important but not urgent things,
all the chores and not chores,
all the fingerjabbing of life,
for this:

Be One w/the Man You Normally Are Not

Complete the smallest
acts of love. The smaller,
the better. Wipe a crumb
from a mouth, swallow
words, you know
which ones, etcetera.
Write down the acts
on lists and show
no one. On the coldest
night of the year,
when your children
come to you cold, burn
the lists. Collect
the ashes. Store them,
and show no one.
When you have enough
for a body, throw a
funeral for a lost
friend, a lost family
member. Invite
no one, but pursue
the ritual doggedly.
Dig and sob and bury.
Afterwards, call the newly
mourned friend, and
greet him as
a risen lord.

Dear Emerson

Change my life
again. Write in a journal
something
maybe whispered from a bird,

a slow hunch
borne out
quickly.

Shake the man who makes
too much of his own time
down, down
to earth. Rub
my face in it, in earth, in grass:

“A man must have aunts
and cousins, must buy carrots and
turnips, must have
barn and woodshed, must go
to market and to the blacksmith’s
shop, must saunter
and sleep and be inferior and
silly.”

It's really such a relief to hear it
said so clearly.

*

A professor, surrounded by a vigorous dog,
once said to me:
clear writing is a morality, is moral.
He was talking about big T
and his cousin, you.

Surrealism, done well,
sounds just like the real world:
that was written on a book jacket
and made sense, too.
Of course you can't just point the camera, right?

Sunlight. Throwing one's arms in the sky
for a stretch. Writing by hand
on the first real day of spring,
a few days into summer. I am one nap away
from waking a real man.

What a world of cameras...

Otto Rank (Vitality, Loss, and Change)

Life in itself is a mere succession of separations. Beginning with birth, going through several weaning periods and the development of the individual personality, and finally culminating in death – which represents the final separation. At birth, the individual experiences the first shock of separation, which throughout his life he strives to overcome. In the process of adaptation, man persistently separates from his old self, or at least from those segments off his old self that are now outlived. Like a child who has outgrown a toy, he discards the old parts of himself for which he has no further use ….The ego continually breaks away from its worn-out parts, which were of value in the past but have no value in the present. The neurotic [who cannot unlearn, and, therefore, lacks creativity] is unable to accomplish this normal detachment process … Owing to fear and guilt generated in the assertion of his own autonomy, he is unable to free himself, and instead remains suspended upon some primitive level of his evolution.

David Lynch once said:

"eachdtflssddyddgcsedopsdegthingddkdvnvndkalcdoaca[ekhasdaickdghnadlpdekafadsfdk.afdipvaldaeeqwaydakca[pedakalafpkadfnadadslofafdsfdsapqewrelvdasjfkdsjkwantingafdsljqrepvnbwewpfdkjnlasdfdtoasfdsakjfdsmdfdlsadfdsfdsafdsabe"

Herzog's Eye

"The biggest danger, in my opinion, is television because to a certain degree it ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. Our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossing hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials. Television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.

As a race we have become aware of certain dangers that surround us. We comprehend, for example, that nuclear power is very real certain danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs. We need images in harmony with our civilization and our innermost conditioning, and this is the reason why I like any film that searches for new images no matter in what direction it moves or what story it tells. One must dig like an archaeologist and search our violated landscape to find anything new. One must go to war, if need be, to find these unprocessed and fresh images."

Application to the Herzog School of Film

"Many great filmmakers have been astonishingly physical, athletic people. A much higher percentage than writers or musicians. Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you have walked alone on foot, let’s say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about five thousand kilometres. While walking, write. Write about your experiences and give me your notebooks. I would be able to tell who had really walked the distance and who had not. While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking and what it truly involves than you ever would sitting in a classroom. During your voyage you will learn more about what your future holds than in five years at film school. Your experiences would be the very opposite of academic knowledge, for academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion."

Mametology

"Those with 'something to fall back on' invariably fall back on it. They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it. But those with no alternative see the world differently."

Old Kind Bitter Thoughtful Beckett

"In a fit of despair I had written him once about what seemed to me an absolute, insoluble conflict between meditation and writing. "What is it about looking at the wall that makes the writing seem obsolete?" Two weeks later, when I'd almost forgotten my question, I received this reply, which I quote in its entirety:

Dear Larry,

When I start looking at walls, I begin to see the writing. From which even my own is a relief.

As ever,

Sam"

The Slow Dignity of Worms

I will write what I have to. There are reasons. I will not write the reasons, because the reasons do not matter. I will write of what matters. Of waking without really sleeping and finding nothing is the same. Of the long fall; of the sudden stop. Of plummeting and of plumage on the way down. Of the real, hard texture of wood. Of what's really going on down in the dirt. Of sitting still and of spinning, spinning, spinning.

I have a message from the people: We are sick. I think it's the strip malls.

There is no such thing as authority, and power dissolves in an instant like pudding. We need to be okay with that. I am making breakfast out of the soft morning light. I am calling you over to share it. We can hold the light in us all day long, and we can share it. By evening, we are like peacocks, and we are glowing.

This is how we sleep: when the inhale runs out, we pretend it isn't so. We are falling.

Rhythm is imaginary, but it is the answer. When the ground shakes, I dance like a motherfucker, and I do not collapse. When the ground shakes again, and everything falls, I surrender. At the bottom, I share my breakfast with the worms. They will bring the light back to the surface.

Please listen: It takes time, but if you bear the wait, the birds will paint the sky with it.

"Happiness,

[David Foster] Wallace suggests
in a Kierkegaardian note at the end
of this deeply sad, deeply philosophical
book, is the ability to pay attention,
to live in the present moment, to find
'second-by-second joy + gratitude
at the gift of being alive.'"

~M. Kakutani, reviewing the new DFW novel in the NY Times. Today.

The Life After

The sense of ease,
you know the one where it feels like you are sitting
in a plush chair
and all lined up with the stars,
telling the world's greatest jokes,
and when they ask,
where'd you get that one,
you say,
it just popped into my head

exists, unfortunately,
either in the mind or
by surprise. It is morning. You are thinking
about the way the furniture and the music
will arrange your evening guests
and weave together
their sentences, their silences.
It will never happen,
this kind of knee
slapping.

Then you are actually snapping off
the ends of beans with your daughter.
You wake from the joytrack
like waking from a dream
you can't recover
no matter how hard you
dive back under covers.

Or is that fortunate, fortune itself,
the way we're primed to unmake our stumbled upon
happiness with others?

How We Were Happy

Watching the wound pass, play and pass,
is Tuesday, is the way an evening

can turn into something
like a birthday candle. No,

like a birthday candle
in an ordinary piece of cake.

Or maybe the cake itself
lit up by the candle.

This is how we were,
this is how we were happy.

All the perfect rhymes
then the additional

word, imperfecting
the perfect, letting the world,

those who are in it,
breath, blow out

candles. Forgiving, even,
the clever, the twice clever,

the habits we can't, won't
suppress. Oh our days

are ordinary and blind
and love is nothing short

of a little bread, a little wine.
What adds up, what stays

is maybe not the planned for miraculous.
Listen up, I am quietly singing

it says
in a hush.

A Great Thing that Happened

Or maybe it's still
happening, still
water. My poem, these days,
is very little more than family. It inks out
in ankles and smiles, the sometimes spilled
milk of a morning, a lark. I'm speaking less
metaphorically than I ever have, this poem.
It does that too
to the man who writes it. Once
I would have called it a metaphysics,
but that would have been a name
slapped on a thing
from a position of naivety. Slugging it
in
or on, a bad badge.

So what does this have to do
with Frank O'Hara and Wisława Szymborska
and Mary Oliver? Only that
I went out looking for people,
poets really, who try like hell
to give the right names to things.
Who don't gussy things up.
Who, sure, organize them
and spin them through poetic organs.
Whatever, and regardless, they

get me back to the -- I'm
so out of practice I don't
really know how to say it --
grace of all stuttured light

that,
in lifting me up,
made me feel like I was
falling. What a wrong,
truly wrong
way to claim
feeling. Forget
feeling, then, a feeling
I keep
coming back to:
the quality of time,
the quality of time,
oh the quality of one's time.

Whether familying or
quite alone, keep telling myself,
reach out for the forks and spoons,
the edges of bookshelves, the
tiny hands, the large hands,
and stop being so consumed
with controlling the narrative.

Try this: you are a single strand
of golden thread,
or something like that,
in the garment on which
they rest their head.

Or this: each moment is fire
and its opposite. Each moment
is unconquerable
by metaphor. Try thanking,
thanking, thanking, thanking
goodness.

Gangrene Graham Grammar Green

"I always say I'd be a good priest because stories come in one ear and go out the other. The power to forget is part of the created thing too. It comes back from the unconscious in another form. It's a difference in a way between the job of a reporter, and that of a novelist. It's yours to remember, mine to forget. In a way what one forgets becomes the unrecognised memory of the future."

Third Base Coach to the Stars

Sexy Saxman

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Zen Illness by James Thurber

I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.” She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, “Is he sick?” “No,” my wife says, “he’s writing something.”

Ray Bradbury's Microphone Check

"If you don’t have a sense of humor, you don’t have a marriage."

Jack, Rose, Coffee

You had a tiny, silent
plate for a pear. Clean-white
as if from a tooth
at sea, dried in salt and sunlight.

Then you sliced the sweetest
one you kept in darkness
days
on days.
For only yourself you would have
bit too soon,
told yourself that ripeness
was not all.
But you could hold it from another,
almost hurtful
in witholding,
to serve a better fruit to a beloved.

Funny, love. It's a blending
of sources. Indeed
the throat can swallow
fire, the skin give way
to a noise of metal.
Both whisper away at the
sculpture of pure relation.
It is finally taking shape.

You, waiting,
waiting now as if born this way,
for the footsteps to appear.
Admit you might hear them first
and turn and spill yourself
into eyes, saving nothing,
even less
if you can.

Four Portraits

Not true—time will not tell. It has no mouth, no language center of the brain. No brain, either. What do these locals of the human array, these Weaklings of a World to Come, mistake for the linear progression of their flesh through velocity and space, if not a gradual blooming of their enigmatic core?

Make a fist. Enclose around that fist the other hand. Now ask—which makes a better self-portrait?

*

Kosha repeated the word again to sample its buffet of syllables: “schlimmbesserung.” It had begun that way. A man in New York had e-mailed a woman in Chicago, who had CC’d her into the spreading fractal chain of their complaints. Some horrible event, the burning of a building and its inhabitants, a meth addict laying his head in an oven, the friend of a friend drinking to disfigure the child in her womb, had made its way toward her across the ever flattening plain of uninformed innocence—that she had eaten a fine dinner last night, enjoying the kale, the Siracha tofu, had slept as if atop a carefree summit, and had the next morning, eager in her flesh, woken in a ball of warmth and dry rest, only to be snapped back into a blameless link of vividness.

Schlimmbesserung. Time will tell. But what will you ask it, she asks—not of herself, nor the earlier addresses in the e-mail, but of the air itself—about such things, what would cause it to evolve so well?

*

He was striding across Lucera Ave., Charybdisian traffic around him, was ticking off in split lightning instances things to be seen. A digital ticker advertisement in a sandwich shop window. A man feeding a dog a banana peel from a public waste basket. The well-tanned left profile of some girl’s lucky, heavy cleavage. When, with the suddenness of aneurysm, something unnaturally still stilled the speed, caffeine, the frantically multiplying branches of overdubbed conversations in his brain, and for a second he stopped short of the next step he was taking—two-thirds beyond the slice of on-coming traffic—and heard a word, a last name, Russian? Greek? Gentile? Jewish? unite the buried drifts of his day.

Yuodzukinas. What a wonder. One word over another makes a name.

*

Can you hear him? He’s barely breathing. When he speaks, it’s a whisper, a whisper that shifts side to side and doesn’t stick, like two kinds of dust rubbed together.

This is the sage, the last weathered blade of grass growing outside the kingdom’s gate. Armies have crossed the plains only to stamp him flat. Herd animals have wiped rump and shit on him. Dream-headed country daughters have fallen on their backs in the fresh reach of so much free grass and spied young men's genitals in the shapes of clouds overhead. The sage is and was always there; an accident himself, by nature he accepts accidents. The trajectories they plot from nothing so much as one hour expanding and expanding, like a drop of ink in white cloth, as one sits and stares, are more necessary than acceptable: by these invitations and ruptures, lives and whole cultures rise and crumble. In the end, giving spine to yet another strong, earth-wrestling blade of grass.

The wind is on his back like a past love. Like a demon pattern spanned and reflected in a fugitive speck of dew. This is how the ancient amnesiacs speak, wielding more poise from the future than they have invested in it.

Time will tell. But first, say everything you can to it. As it makes its way towards you, what it forgets it sacrifices, the Grass Master says, to appease a failed fulfillment.

Creative Strategist Richard Feynman

"When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.

Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"

Paymaster Celine

"You don't do anything for free. You've got to pay. A story you make up, that isn't worth anything. The only story that counts is the one you pay for. When it's paid for, then you've got the right to transform it. Otherwise it's lousy..."

Charlie Sheen Rant

He continued:

"OK, last I checked, Chaim, I've spent, I think, close to the last decade effortlessly and magically converting your tin cans into pure gold, and the gratitude I get is this charlatan chose not to do his job, which is write. Clearly someone who thinks he is above the law. Well, you've been warned, dude. Bring it."

Sheen said he didn't believe in the Bible, which was full of "talking snakes."

And he advised Sunday churchgoers: "(You're) missing a lot of good sports, people."

There were also some additional, confusing references to ninjas.

Direct Competitor / Field Notes / Nothing Blossoms

Get after it:

http://mentholmountains.blogspot.com/
____________

Most beautiful thing haunting me lately
is a line I can't quite recall
from a name I can't remember. It goes
something like this:

the music I make knows more about me than I do...

Think about that. Applied to your own situation.
____________

I now want to make a short film about that idea. Home movies; ice in the glass.
____________

Either / or
Neither / noir
____________

Snow is falling now and I haven't forgotten what you said about glass.
(Put that in the file of great opening lines in the letters we will never write. Scratch that . . .
decent opening lines, letters we might write.)
____________

What ARE you the secretary of these days? I am less interested than ever in your presidencies.

And Robert Irwin

And Kafka

"One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory."

Vallejo & Tarjei Vesaas

"...in all his acts, big and small, internal and visible, conscious and subconscious, and even when he sleeps and when he errs or betrays himself."

"We walk past like debtors/ because our life turned out easier."

Though the Sun's Not Up and You Weren't Looking for a Reply

Reading your comment this morning was one of those moments where physical distance just kind of eats away at me. It sits there with its precious silverware and feasts on my heart. Or laughs at me, like a Sphinx. I don’t know the answer to its riddle. What I’m saying, one of the things I’m saying, is it would be damn nice to drink about six hours of coffee with you. Or walk across a city with no bedtime.

First I need to clarify that moment in New York you referenced. I remember the exact point I was trying to make. And I remember that I was never, ever going to be able to make it that evening. I was speaking too clumsily, and you, my friend, were hearing too clumsily. Not that clarifying at this late date will eradicate any of the help or damage of that comment, but all I was trying to say then, for the sake of honest friendship, was that I loved the Novenas and wish there could have been more. I was talking about the way we change – as writers, as people – and saying that I really liked the guy you were when you wrote the Novenas. Probably part of me liked the guy I was when you wrote the Novenas. The guys we were. The place we were in. I mean, nights on bleachers reciting our own poems from memory . . . that was real. So, to come around to it, I wasn’t asking a big question about what you had become as a writer or why you had kept going. I was simply talking about the fact that we can’t write the same poems that we wrote when we were young – and that I liked the poems you wrote when you were young. The comment was probably a little bit selfish, but, in New York City, after 10:00, what isn't?

On, now, to the rest of it. I would put myself in the camp (if there is one) who feels that what you have “done” or “achieved” with your writing is no longer important BECAUSE it has turned you into the man you have become (and are becoming): A deeply good man. A deeply sane man. A deeply funny man. A man who is deeply alive. What’s my proof for this? Just being around you all these years. And I honestly believe that your engagement with language (forget calling it writing poetry or making art – it’s the fact that you roll around in the glorious slop of language every day) has carved you up in body and spirit . . . has delivered you to the world’s doorstep . . . exactly as you are and were meant to be.

You, my friend, are a version of freedom. But let’s go on a little further.

You are also a bundle of questions. Meaning, your freedom will never be without limit. Which makes it moral. I’m laughing now because you can never disprove any of this . . . try as you might, you can never walk down the street next to yourself and get lost in what that is like.

And further… Are you pursuing writing or a writing career? I think you have dabbled in the latter but never, ever waivered in the former. And there’s a cost in that. I don’t think it’s a big, lifetime cost. I think it’s a small, nagging cost. The economics are tricky, and I know you know them well. Art, to be noticed, needs a man in a suit who takes it as his job to sell it. The real artists I know can only wear that suit awkwardly, and for so long. But there are some semi-artists who actually prefer the suit. They look good in the suit. They enjoy its fit. And their small "a" art becomes an extension of the suit. It floats above all the other art temporarily. Because, when the suit dies, the art it held up falls to the ground.

I know I don’t need to explain this to you. I know I don’t need to say that the man who writes, steadily, out of the deepest part of himself, actually builds the day itself. He doesn't hold it up or show it off; he doesn't hock it or talk about it. He actually builds it! And holy shit that is hard and wonderful work. You should know... you've been doing it well for ten odd years.

first shyku

God is how
old I am

A Philip Guston

said, “I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through.”

A James Crumley

first line:

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

At The Medical Museum

Here we were, circling the same two block radius three days after Christmas, Philadelphia. Anna's cousin, Marie, and her husband had squeezed in a last-minute appointment at the hospital for what they thought would be hours--their first sonogram--and since we had driven up to the city early, decided to visit the medical museum. A foot of snow had fallen on Christmas Day. Mounds of it frozen solid along the sidewalks. There were no spaces free on South Street, but after rounding the block once more we caught an SUV pulling away from a metered spot on 22nd. The lady at the front desk let us in at a student rate--ten bucks less than full price--and after hanging our coats in the coat room off the foyer, we muted our cell phones and passed under the center staircase into the main hall.

It had the air of a 19th century study. In fact, the main room, two stories of oddities shelved and displayed behind glass, had all the musky, varnished orderliness of a mansion library. The upper level overlooked a lower, larger room; along the iron railing there were display cases of bone fragments, animal skulls, and, in one case, a two-foot length of leatherized human skin. We began at a display of forensic evidence and moved counterclockwise along the wall, which featured, in order: an otologists' collection of ear bones (fifty pieces, labeled); surgical instruments of Civil War field doctors; daguerrotype reproductions of amputees (shiny, blank eyes); six human skeletons accompanied by instructions on how to identify sex, race, occupation and manner of death; an adipocere mummy, "The Soap Lady", whose flesh had been preserved as a waxy putty of fat. After plaster models of various syphilitic ailments and tumorous growths, we reached the wall-length cabinet furthest from the entrance, and began reading the names, ages, and places of origin of forty-eight skulls set a hand's length apart and staring out at the faces on the other side of the glass.

On each the identifying details and manner of death were written in calligraphic ink on the cranial dome. And these, Anna pointed out, were enigmatic threads as well, extending from the mortician or collector's hand to our own. Weren't we also writing these names down, in our pocket notebooks? And was this a proper, respectful way of presenting oneself to the scavenged and the beheaded, glibly jumbled together and numbered? Their stories were minimal and far-flung enough; the hand felt enough emotion to write them down. From skull to hand, to pulped paper: skull of Adalbert Czaptieonesz -- age 51 -- Poland, Catholic, suicide -- cut his throat because of extreme poverty.

Whole lives were set down in fifteen words or less. Some were suggestive enough to mold features onto the naked slates of their faces.

An infamous Thai pirate, a Serbian assassin, a maid-servant who killed herself after being accused of stealing. On the shelf above was a mother who had been executed for killing her two children, alongside a young suicide who killed for love. Hangings, drownings, gunshot wounds, an old, hard-worn Russian who cut his throat at seventy and, due to a calcified larynx, lived for ten more years to "die in good spirits". Four rows of twelve each, the minimal remains of a single body flayed to pieces and leaping back to an original, undamaged oneness.

The afternoon crowd was busy, we kept moving, right to left. Before pushing on Anna pointed to one last, smaller skull at our knees. Gazing out of two eye-holes and a gaping nasal pyramid, rushing into brain matter mercurial, mood darkened and blinking: Andjrejew Sokoloff -- Scopzi (Russian sect that believes in castration), dead of self-inflicted removal of testicles.

The forehead was prominent, the teeth jagged and cadmium blue. The mortician's handwriting covered the left side of the skull. But the lower jawbone was missing, as with all of them. One would have to hold a skull like that to gauge how much it weighed. And have one just like it, to imagine how heavy.