We Shall Not Cease From Exploration III

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

-- T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

**

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

-- Nelson Algren


**

Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

-- Delmore Schwartz, For Rhoda


That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit's motive.

-- Delmore Schwartz, The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me

**

Love set you going like a fat gold watch
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat.

-- Sylvia Plath, Morning Song

**

From twenty feet away she looked like a million dollars. From six feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from twenty feet away.

-- Raymond Chandler


It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.

-- Raymond Chandler

[BFrank]

Well, if it isn't IsoscelesTriangleDanceCallingSteve!

[this name's been cracking me up for months!]

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Walter: I agree with you about Hesse's apparent lack of interest in what most people would consider basic personal knowledge. You and I think it's cool, but I know that same quality makes The Glass Bead Game seem grotesque to many readers. To me, it gives the novel a kind of austere majesty; but I can see how this utter indifference to the characters' attitudes about sex, romance, family, religion, and so forth gives many readers the feeling of unreality and 'nothing to hang on to.'

People with a philosophical bent, like yourself, are at home with the almost disembodied dialogues of GBG, or The Republic. But most folks need a landscape to hang their ideas on: like Stephen's friend at the end of Joyce's Portrait, who always amused Daedelus by recalling the place and time -- 'yes, just after Easter, at the trolley station down by the piers' -- that they had last discussed a certain subject. Joyce's more abstract dialogues in Portrait and Ulysses are as uncompromising as Hesse's; but Joyce is by far the greater novelist, of course, and his abstractions are always deeply rooted in the mundane realities, and seem to be in active interplay with them. Joyce once described Ulysses as a "cathedral constructed of thousands of little pieces of dung," and I think the almost total absence of juicy details in GBG makes it a little too inhuman for most tastes.

One more note: you'll probably pick up on it, but the last chapter is not written in the same voice as the rest of the book -- the pedantic scholar from the future Castalia -- but from an underground classic which circulates within Castalia about the legend of the final days of Knecht; and it is in this chapter where you will find the most interesting writings about his "awakenings."

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°


"You mean you thought I was a college graduate? Where did you get that idea? Your mother?"

"I guess so, yes."

"Well, your mother has her own way of dealing with information."

**

Occasionally the Wilsons would invite them upstairs, or come down; more often the two of them sat reading magazines in the living room, while cars and Fifth Avenue droned past the windows. One or the of them might make a plate of fudge, more to kill time than to satisfy any craving, and on Sundays there were good programs on the radio, but for the most part they were as idle as if they had nothing to do but wait for the telephone to ring. And what could be less likely than that? Who would want to call up an aging divorcee with rotten teeth, or a plain, skinny girl who moped around feeling sorry for herself all the time?

**

She didn't say yes, but she certainly didn't say no. Everything he did -- even when he helped her to free one foot from her underpants -- seemed to happen because it was urgently necessary: she was helpless and he was helping her, and nothing else mattered in the world.

**

And she was crying easily now, causing her mother to reach over and squeeze her hand: the only trouble was that she couldn't be sure whether she cried for her father or for Warren Maddock, or Maddox, who was back in South Carolina now being shipped out to a division.

But she stopped crying abruptly when she realized that even that was a lie: these tears, as always before in her life, were wholly for herself -- for poor, sensitive Emily Grimes whom nobody understood, and who understood nothing.


-- Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

BFrank: and as I explained then (the name came from The Invincible Larry Nagel, challenging me another chess game), Triangles are used only at the highest levels of square dancing (Challenge levels) and are among the very most difficult of all formations, requiring the dancers first to identify the two three-person triangles embedded within the formation of eight dancers: wave-based triangles, interlocked tandem-based triangles, inpoint triangles... it gets pretty crazy.

[walto]

Originally posted by Squaredancecalling Steve
Triangles are used only at the highest levels of square dancing (Challenge levels) and are among the very most difficult of all formations, requiring the dancers first to identify the two three-person triangles embedded within the formation of eight dancers: wave-based triangles, interlocked tandem-based triangles, inpoint triangles... it gets pretty crazy.

Sounds kind of like one of Tegularius's Glass Bead concoctions.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Well the triangles in square dancing are probably as esoteric as Tegularius's GBG idosyncracies, and at their best they are no doubt as elegant, too -- but these are hardly monks dancing the figures!

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

I used to be Snow White... but I drifted.


-- Mae West

Give a man a free hand and he'll put it all over you.


-- Mae West

**

The mystical is not *how* the world is, but *that* it is.

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein


The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

**

The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.

-- Muriel Rukeyser

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°


Emily had come down from Barnard to spend a weekend with her, and Pookie was fixing sardine sandwiches for lunch. She pried the last oily shred of sardine from the can with two fingers. "Besides," she said, and sucked fingers. "Besides, can you imagine me as a grandmother?"

Emily wanted to say I can't even imagine you as a mother, but controlled herself. The important thing on these weekends was to survive them...

**

She served a lunch that was almost as inadequate as one of Pookie's meals; the the problem was that the conversation kept petering out. Sarah wanted to hear "everything" about Barnard, but when Emily began to talk she saw her sister's eyes glaze over in smiling boredom. Pookie said, "Isn't this nice? Just the three of us together again?" But it wasn't really very nice at all, and for most of the afternoon they sat around the sparsely furnished living room in attitudes of forced conviviality, Pookie smoking many cigarettes and dropping ashes on the rug, three women with nothing much to say to one another.

**

School was the center of her life. She had never heard the word "intellectual" used as a noun before she went to Barnard, and she took it to heart. It was a brave noun, a noun suggesting lifelong dedication to lofty things and a cool disdain for the commonplace. An intellectual might lose her virginity to a soldier in the park, but she could learn to look back on it with wry, amused detachment. An intellectual might have a mother who showed her underpants when drunk, but she wouldn't let it bother her.



-- Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

[Ron Thorne]

Even though I've been an infrequent contributor to this thread over the years, I'm comforted to see it re-emerge here, especially at this particular time.

Thanks for helping keep intellect, sensitivity and prose alive, Steve.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Thanks, Ron! The first incarnation of this thread prompted you to start the 'Words of Famous Jazz Cats' thread in Speak Out, and I hope you'll revive that one here, too.

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out.

-- Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?

**

No matter how much we seek, we never find anything but ourselves.

-- Anatole France

**

I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything. I am free.

-- Nikos Kazantzakis

**

The past is indestructible. Sooner or later things turn up. One of the things that turns up is a plan to destroy the past.

-- Jorge Luis Borges

**

Music is a place in the ear.

-- Harry Partch

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

I don't drink liquor. I don't like it. It makes me feel good.

-- Oscar Levant

**

She's the sort of woman who lives for others -- you can always tell the others by their hunted look.

-- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

**

We do feel, in our most valued musical experiences, that we are making contact with a great spirit, and not simply with a prodigious musical faculty.

-- JWN Sullivan

**

Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

-- TS Eliot


°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

One distressing thing Emily learned in college was to feel more intelligent that her sister. She had felt more intelligent than her mother for years, but that was different, when it happened with Sarah she felt she had betrayed a trust.

**

"... when it turned out I didn't have the talent to perform I tried composing. Studied composition at Eastman until it was clear I didn't have much talent for that either; then I gave up music altogether."

"It must be very --- painful to give up something like that."

"Oh, it broke my heart. But then, back in those days my heart was getting broken on an average of about once a month, so it was only a matter of degree. What would you like for dessert?"

**

... he was perfectly content to be a seaman. He said he liked the freedom it gave him.

"Well, but I mean, freedom to do what?"

"Not necessarily to 'do' anything. Freedom to be."

"Oh. I see. At least I think I see."


-- Richard Yates, The Easter Parade

[walto]

Under existing conditions in the civilized world, the great struggle among men is for the possession of wealth. Would it not then be irrational to expect that the science which treats of the production and distribution of wealth should be exempt from the influence of that struggle? Macaulay has well said that if any large pecuniary interest were concerned in disputing the attraction of gravitation, that most obvious of all facts would not yet be accepted.

Henry George, "The Science of Political Economy"

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

For some of necessity go astray because for them there is no such things as the right path.

-- Thomas Mann

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by incapacity.

**

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

**

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

**

What is now proved was once only imagined.



-- William Blake, Proverbs of Hell


°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

He stood slumped and staring out the big window at the yellowed grass and naked trees. "I read an interview with Irving Berlin once," he said. "The guy asked him what his greatest fear was, and he said, 'Some day I'm going to reach for it, and it isn't going to be there.' Well, that's me, baby. I know I had it -- I could feel it, the way you feel blood in your veins -- and now I reach for it and reach for it, and it isn't there."

**

She had evidently been undecided about which of several pieces of bright costume jewelry to wear with her cheap beige suit, and had solved the problem by wearing them all.

**

It wasn't until nearly five o'clock that she began to feel a guilty pleasure: now that she had seen her sister, it might be many months -- maybe years -- before she would have to see her again.

**

"I don't get it," Emily said. "If I say 'You have the patience of a saint,' it certainly doesn't mean you *are* one."

"Ah." He leaned back in his chair, smiling at her. "But if I say 'You have the eyes of a strumpet,' there might conceivably be room for doubt."

**

No sight or sound or smell in the whole of New York was free of old associations; wherever she walked, and she sometimes walked for hours, she found only the past.


-- Richard Yates, Easter Parade, 1976

[aristide]

Pigeons

They paddle with staccato feet
In powder-pools of sunlight,
Small blue busybodies
Strutting like fat gentlemen
With hands clasped
Under their swallowtail coats;
And, as they stump about,
Their heads like tiny hammers
Tap at imaginary nails
In non-existent walls.
Elusive ghosts of sunshine
Slither down the green gloss
Of their necks in an instant, and are gone.

Summer hangs drugged from sky to earth
In limpid fathoms of silence:
Only warm dark dimples of sound
Slide like slow bubbles
From the contented throats.

Raise a casual hand -
With one quick gust
They fountain into air.

Richard Kell

squaredancecaller, where are all our other posts? have we to copy them all again now? ;-)

[walto]

It really is Spring! Our beloved aristide is back!!!

[aristide]

thank you walter horn, i didn't recognize you at first. the old speak easy was much easier to manage...i was taking pictures in the meantime, but they are too big :-(
yes, spring is here....finally

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

ARI!!!!!!! How great to see you back!!

I think Lois plans to have all the threads from the old board available as a searchable archive, but they are still working on this.

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

In history as it comes to be written, there is usually some Spirit of the Age which historians can define, but the shape of things is seldom so clear to those who live them. To most thoughtful men it has generally seemed that theirs was an Age of Confusion, and to some greater or less extent we always belong to a lost generation. Things are never what they used to be, and while some are resigning themselves to disaster, there are always others quite sure that much better times are on the way.

-- Joseph Wood Krutch, The Measure Of Man

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

-- GB Shaw, Man and Superman

[jesus marion joseph]

Originally posted by walto
Sounds kind of like one of Tegularius's Glass Bead concoctions.

LOL!

[walto]

You kidding me? I am a regular laugh riot! I got a million of 'em!!! No, a billion!!!

[aristide]

No Swan So Fine

"No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles." No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
as the chintz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea urchins, and everlastings,
it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers - at ease and tall. The king is dead.

Marianne Moore

squaredancecaller :-))) glad to see you again, i've got a digicam and i was taking pictures all the time, so i had no time to copy and paste but i promise, i will do my work as before from now on ;-)

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Glad to hear it, aristide! It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

BTW, my son's an avid digital photographer, too. He took a great series of shots of the fountain in the town square last week.

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

by Wallace Stevens



I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.


_

II


I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.


_

III


The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.


_

IV


A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.


_

V


I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.


_

VI


Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.


_

VII


O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?


_

VIII


I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.


_

IX


When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.


_

X


At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.


_

XI


He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.


_

XII


The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.


_

XIII


It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

[lazarus]

The Naked Bosom


Mr. Palomar is walking along a lonely beach. He encounters few bathers. One young woman is lying on the sand taking the sun, her bosom bared. Palomar, discreet by nature, looks away at the horizon of the sea. He knows that in such circumstances, at the approach of a strange man, women often cover themselves hastily, and this does not seem right to him: because it is a nuisance for the woman peacefully sunbathing, and because the passing man feels he is an intruder, and because the taboo against nudity is implicitly confirmed; because half-respected conventions spread insecurity and incoherence of behavior rather than freedom and frankness.

And so, as soon as he sees in the distance the outline of the bronze-pink cloud of a naked female torso, he quickly turns his head in such a way that the trajectory of his gaze remains suspended in the void and guarantees his civil respect for the invisible frontier that surrounds people.

But--he thinks as he proceeds and resumes, the moment the horizon is clear, the free movement of his eyeballs--in acting like this, I display a refusal to see; or, in other words, I am finally reinforcing the convention that declares illicit any sight of the breast; that is to say, I create a kind of mental brassiere suspended between my eyes and that bosom, which, from the flash that reached the edge of my visual field, seemed to me fresh and pleasing to the eye. In other words, my not looking presupposes that I am thinking of that nakedness, worrying about it; and this is basically an indiscreet and reactionary attitude.

Returning from his stroll, Palomar again passes that bather, and this time he keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead, so that his gaze touches with impartial uniformity the foam of the retreating waves, the boats pulled up on shore, the great bath towel spread out on the sand, the swelling moon of lighter skin with the dark halo of the nipple, the outline of the coast in the haze, gray against the sky.

There--he reflects, pleased with himself, as he continues on his way--I have succeeded in having the bosom completely absorbed by the landscape, so that my gaze counted no more than the gaze of a seagull or a hake.

But is this really the right way to act?--he reflects further. Or does it not mean flattening the human person to the level of things, considering it an object, and, worse still, considering as an object that which in the person is the specific attribute of the female sex? Am I not perhaps perpetuating the old habit of male superiority, hardened over the years into a habitual insolence?

He turns and retraces his steps. Now, in allowing his gaze to run over the beach with neutral objectivity, he arranges it so that, once the woman's bosom enters his field of vision, a break is noticeable, a shift, almost a darting glance. That glance goes on to graze the taut skin, withdraws, as if appreciating with a slight start the different consistency of the view and the special value it acquires, and for a moment the glance hovers in mid-air, making a curve that accompanies the swell of the breast from a certain distance, elusively but also protectively, and then runs on as if nothing had happened.

In this way I believe my position is made quite clear--Palomar thinks--with no possible misunderstandings. But couldn't this grazing of his eyes finally be taken for an attitude of superiority, an underestimation of what a breast is and means, as if putting it aside, on the margin, or in parentheses? So I am relegating the bosom again to the semidarkness where centuries of sexo-maniacal puritanism and of desire considered sin have kept it . . .

This interpretation runs counter to Palomar's best intentions, for though he belongs to a human generation for whom the nudity of the female bosom was associated with the idea of amorous intimacy, still he hails approvingly this change in customs, both for what it signifies as the reflection of a more broad-minded society and because this sight in particular is pleasing to him. It is this detached encouragement that he would like to be able to express with his gaze.

He does an about-face. With firm steps he walks again toward the woman lying in the sun. Now his gaze, giving the landscape a fickle glance, will linger on the breast with special consideration, but will quickly include it in an impulse of good will and gratitude for the whole, for the sun and sky, for the bent pines and the dune and the beach and the rocks and the clouds and the seaweed, for the cosmos that rotates around those haloed cusps.

This should be enough to reassure once and for all the solitary sunbather and clear away all perverse assumptions. But the moment he approaches again, she suddenly springs up, covers herself with an impatient huff, and goes off, shrugging in irritation, as if she were avoiding the tiresome insistence of a satyr.

The dead weight of an intolerant tradition prevents anyone's properly understanding the most enlightened intentions, Palomar bitterly concludes.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

from Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino

[walto]

Hi, Lars. I love your avatar!

[lazarus]

Hi Walter
My avatar loves men with big beards.

[walto]

That being the case, I only wish it was a picture of me!!

(It's Tagore. A lot of women DID like Rabi. They mostly seemed to die young on him, though.)

[aristide]

squaredancecaller, "Glad to hear it, aristide! It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it." *LOL*



The Fish

wade
through black fade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices-
in and out, illuminating

the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron throught the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

pink
rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.

All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice-
all the physical features of

ac-
cident-lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is

dead.
Repeated
evidence ahs proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.

Marianne Moore

[lazarus]

Excerpts from The Blue Octavo Notebooks
by Franz Kafka





They were given the chance of becoming kings or the kings' messengers. As is the way with children, they all wanted to be messengers. That is why there are only messengers, racing through the world and, since there are no kings, calling out to each other the messages that have now become meaningless. They would gladly put an end to their miserable life, but they do not dare to do so because of their oath of loyalty.



He is a free and secure citizen of this earth, for he is attached to a chain that is long enough to make all areas of the earth accessible to him, and yet only so long that nothing can pull him over the edges of the earth. At the same time, however, he is also a free and secure citizen of heaven, for he is also attached to a similarly calculated heavenly chain. Thus, if he wants to get down to earth, he is choked by the heavenly collar and chain; if he wants to get into heaven, he is choked by the earthly one. And in spite of this he has all the possibilities, and feels that it is so; indeed, he even refuses to attribute the whole thing to a mistake in the original chaining.



He runs after facts like a beginner learning to skate, who, furthermore, practices somewhere where it is forbidden.



Adam's first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent.



If what is supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was indestructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a fake belief.



Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.



The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.



Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. _

__There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

[aristide]

Sheep In Fog

The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells ----
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,

A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

Sylvia Plath

[Tom Storer]

Here we are. All mouth. All words and exhalations.

Kitty Flood is unconscious, laid out, undignified, content. She barely moves, lying impressive on the soft pallet of her large bed in her big dark room in the great and ridiculous house up there on the tiny mountains, the hills, south of the city, above us.

She's all mouth, Kitty Flood. Her snoring is riotous. She's held in the gummy grip of a deep, dreamy sleep--her body inhales and her breath dries her tongue, her lips, her throat. She tastes everything. Her dreams exhale. Her dreams and her mind and her memory breathe out, emanate, fill the still air with all her familiar places--the house, the rooms, the corridors, the stairs. But they're turned inside out. Her sleeping logic is tangled, it has everything backwards, reversed, with the walls concentrated in the centre, a sullen mass, and the rooms bared to the hills, and the windows unworkable. Kitty's nose twitches, and her closed eyes dart.

Taste brings in the world, coming and going over her huddled teeth like dark clouds over dry rocks. Her world in her mouth. The dreams themselves are standard, petty, daft. Nonsense items, parades, meaningless; they are sexual or stressed or scary; sometimes involving her parents, rattling incoherently, much as she remembers them, or others now also dead or otherwise lost to her; or more contemporary people, mostly Delly for example, frail and translucent and preceded by bells; or various members of the Cotter family, continually appearing out of nowhere with a duster or a lawnmower or a scribbled invoice; and more recently of course Dr. Addison-Blake, George, who tends to manifest himself as a kind of stage American, with a deep southern drawl and a ten gallon hat and a loud good ol' boy laugh, none of which he actually possesses in real life.

Real life.

Is the world no more than a mouthful, do you think?

The wispy plots of her dreams fill the room with pictures. A confusion of homes. Embarrassments and things said incorrectly. Naked moments, occasional falling, secrets betrayed. Random comedy--burying her car in a garden, hosting a chat show, making hats for world leaders.

But it is, all of it, tasted. Her snoring sometimes pauses while she chews. Her dreams traipse across her tongue and fiddle with her teeth. She keeps mouthwash by her bedside, and a basin to spit in, because frankly, it would be unhygienic not to.

- Keith Ridgway, The Parts

[aristide]

Ducks bobbing on the water


Ducks bobbing on the water--
are they also, tonight,
hoping to get lucky?


Kobayashi Issa
(Translated by Robert Hass)

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Aristide -- one of my young (early 20s) dancers up in Willits is a nature photographer. One of his favorite things is wading into ponds to snap the water birds from eye level. (Another is to cover himself with leaves and twigs and lie motionless on the ground in the woods, so he can snap the little critters who would normally hide from him!)

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

**

(On what it takes to make a best seller A little religion, a little aristocracy, a little sex, a little mystery -- as summed up in this sentence: "My God!" cried the Duchess, "I've been f**ked! But by whom?"

-- W. Somerset Maugham

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

By beauty the sensuous man is led to form and to thought; by beauty the spiritual man is brought back to matter and restored to the world of sense.

-- J. C. Friedrich von Schiller, Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man. Letter XVIII.

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

A man must learn to endure that patiently which he cannot avoid conveniently. Our life is composed, as is the harmony of the World, of contrary things; so of divers tunes, some pleasant, some harsh, some sharp, some flat, some low, and some high. What would that Musician say that should love but some one of them? He ought to know how to use them severally and how to intermingle them. So must we do of goods and evils which are consubstantial to our life. Our being cannot subsist without this commixture, and one element is no less necessary than the other. To go about to kick against natural necessity were to represent the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook a kicking match with his mule.

-- Michel de Montaigne, Of Experience

**

What do I know?

-- Montaigne's motto