The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

As I mentioned in my previous post, and I should go on record as saying that the most annoying thing about blogging is that the newest is on top, and so there is reverse apparent chronology, I lived in da Branx for a few years. I was praised frequently for being "brave" for moving from Goldsboro, North Carolina, to New York City, New York. (The Bronx address was simply a matter of finding an affordable apartment. I would like to say, loudly and clearly, that I loved my landlord there: he was a good egg, a good guy, and an honorable person. I was very lucky.) There was no courage involved. Is a city going to hurt you? What a dumb thing to say.

Anyway, I meant to tell y'all about a dream. I dreamed that I met Death. He was vague, so don't ask me to tell you what he looked like. He was also, by the way, a he. In all the odd protest about "foregrounding" in language and assuming that people must be male unless otherwise specified, I have not once heard anyone protest at the way that most societies (all?) assume that Death is male. This is especially surprising, when you think about it, because Death keeps his pelvis covered, so how do we know Death is male? It's not like there are any secondary sexual characteristics left... or primary, for that matter. Anyway, Death was male, blobby gray but male (look: I'm blobby, myself, and I'm male), and I said, "I have been waiting for you all my life, you know." (I see now that that was a joke, but, in my dream, it wasn't intended to be a joke, and Death, who is reputed to have no sense of humor, didn't get it.) Death said that he wasn't free to come and go whenever people thought about him. I asked him, then, who exactly is in charge of him, and he said, "Mostly, it's you." (I don't think he meant me, particularly.)

I started to think that was a cool answer. In my defense, people, I was asleep. Anyway, I quickly began to have some brain function and told him that was a stupid, 1960's answer. That, unfortunately, woke me up. It was a choice of not getting to call Death on his B.S. or not getting to talk to him.

When I lived in da Branx, I used to play a game. I woke up every morning at about 5:30, and I was on the train by 6:15 AM to be at work. I absolutely LOVE THE SUBWAY! Yeah, I know -- death, trains, tunnels, mysterious houses, etc., but we're not talking about death now, so get your mind out of the dirt.

>Hey! Close the cell phone. Don't answer that text message: I'm trying to tell you about the game I played.

Ok, so I had this game. The objective was simple. Without using headphones before the train was in motion or after it came to a stop, could I journey from my home in Pelham Bay to my work beside the Guggenheim Museum and return at the end of the day without once hearing the "F word" used in anger? If someone used it in a joke, or as an interjection or ejaculation, that would be acceptable, but I couldn't hear it as a weapon in the whole time. I lost. In two years of working, I never won the game once.

I moved from New York to a really dangerous town, Baltimore, and then came down to a suburb of Taulkinham. I went from 8,000,000 people in my town to 394. I think that was brave. I also went from riding the train to work every morning and afternoon and reading books to driving a car every morning and afternoon and listening to CD's. I'm agitated by that, because I can find more interesting books than interesting CD's these days, but it puts me back into Mainstream Merica. Merican's drive, and I drive. Mericans have bumperstickers, and I have one, too. I went to a church where no one noticed to one where I get phone calls about every event and where my denomination was almost a majority to where my denomination is frequently confused with alcoholism.

I also developed a new game. The Branx game wouldn't be interesting, as hearing that word used in that manner ever, here, would be a special occasion. Instead, the game is getting to and from work without seeing Death. Opposums, nature's speed bump, are ubiquitous enough that they are difficult to mourn. Somehow, these creatures must have adapted their reproductive cycle to the natural predation of the automobile. (Q. Why did the chicken cross the road? A. To prove to the 'possum that it could be done.) Armadillos show up, too. They don't belong here, and they're really, really good at digging up plants, so no one frets over their tiny eviscera scooped into their shells on the roadbed. Deer, too, lie beside the road -- their dead eyes gazing down the highway as if they were searching for a destination. Most distressing, to me, are the dogs and cats, and there are far too many of them. Some have collars, most do not. Whether their deaths are grisly or "clean," they are dead, and all the love and joy they could bring is dashed, all the love and joy they had elided.

Do I win this game? Yes. Sometimes I make it. It's not often, though.

The point of these games, though, is not merely satire. The reason I'm telling you about them at all is that both were violence, both force. Both the hate and anger I heard, eructations of unquiet souls, and the dead who lie in the median like passengers waiting for their conductor to stop the train, were compulsions to the world. The book blurred, and the song goes to hiss and noise, when these interruptions come. I cannot then pretend that I am traveling alone, that there is beauty or wisdom to go with me. If I listen to a delicate Brahms air in my car and see the crushed animal, or the animal pointing its broken snout at the yellow line, then Brahms is a liar, and if I were reading Shelby Foote's chivalrous prose when Angie screamed at Tricia that she was a bad person, then Foote fled.

Death said that he mainly waited for me, that I was in charge. What a stupid lie. The bastard interrupts.

Sloganeering

It sickens me that "slonganeering" is a word, but I'm pretty ill to begin with, so it can hardly be the only pathogen.

This morning, the BBC said something quite innocent, and I have no fault with it, but it set me to thinking. They were speaking of My President Obama, and they said that "he has a way with words" and therefore expected a grand inauguration speech from him.
That's the thing, folks. Words don't mean anything, and yet American business and Americans themselves have concentrated on words as if they are the primitive, runic spells that we find on lintels saying, "This house will stand." Magical words and words as magic... this stuff is old, and we're somewhat past it in general. I think there are "magical" words, in that if you call my name, I will answer or look, and so the word by itself has done something. In such a way, the divine invests some words the way that I invest my name. However, it is not the word that did that, but the divinity.

Anyway, there are all sorts of people who look at Barrack Obama's speeches and decide that what they need is "rebranding" and that he is a "brand." It doesn't help that Obama's people allowed all those "Hope" posters up. I'd like to think, though, that the one word posters were the magician's moving hand -- distractions for the audience -- because I know that they didn't sway any voters, and they were nothing to My President Obama's speeches.

If you don't believe I. A. Richards, who said that a word carries no meaning, that a word's "meaning" is only a listing of its potential syntactic positions, then perhaps you'll believe St. Paul, who said, "Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life" (2 Cor. 3:6). Richards, by the way, was saying that "meaning" in a dictionary is simply a list of positions, for a word has no meaning outside of a sentence or an utterance.

Imagine some poor fellow with a brain injury who shouts out, "Martians!" every few minutes. Is there a meaning to that word? Will he increase awareness of life on Mars? During the Democratic primaries, and then during the General Election, all anyone could say was "Change." Every comedian had a joke about that, and I had my own memory that made me wince every time I heard them get a verbal spasm.

You see, I used to live in da Branx, in New York. (More about that when I get a chance.) Lotto playing was a plague there. I used to go to a tiny bodega for...magazines. The thing was one body width wide and four steps deep. The magazines I wanted were at the very end of the shotgun shack. Anyway, panhandlers were common there, in Tremont Square, and I was used to them. Next door to the bodega was a "doughnut shop" that I went to every day. (In NYC, donut shops are usually diners, and diners are restaurants, and restaurants are bars.)

Anyhow, one day, there was a haggard and repulsive woman in her fifties outside the bodega. She shouted, in the most nasal tones, "Change?! Change?!" People would give her a dollar every so often. She would then take one step, inside the bodega, get another scratch off Lotto card, rub off squares, lose, throw the card on the ground, and shout out, again, "Change?! Change?!" That's all she did. She was begging to play Lotto. She had a home. She had a family. She had some kind of major neurological disability.

Anyway, I kept hearing her when the candidates put up their "Change" banners.

Barrack Obama's magic is not words. Let Republicans and lesser Democrats imitate his words, if they want. In Baltimore, they went nuts for a "Believe" bumper sticker. It didn't do anything. Let corporate weasels concentrate on "brand images." It won't help their products. They will simply grab another Lotto card, have no luck, and go back to more "change" in their "brand."

My President Barrack Obama is amazing because of his sentiments, thoughts, expressions, speeches, utterances, and feelings and that is not a matter of a word.

The Unborn

I have been thinking about birth and its rights, members, and appurtenances whatsoever. More particularly, I have been thinking about how we talk about birth.

Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry. . .
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools. -- King Lear

Indeed, we are "born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed," as Thomas Fuller said, and certainly I have done my bit along those lines. That said, there is a term that bears consideration, for we have increasingly begun to use it in a novel manner. That word is, as you can foretell from the title, "Unborn."

On a literal level, "unborn" makes no sense whatsoever. It is the opposite of being "born again," despite the number of people who call themselves "born again" who worry about the "unborn." To be unborn is to reverse birth, to undo delivery, to return to sender. To be placed back in the womb.

Some smug psychoanalysts would say that being "unborn" is the source of all our desires. Residual fetal memory, you see, is the source of the concept of the Garden of Eden, Marx's idea of "primitive Communism," and any other lost idyll. Therefore, getting un-born would be every human's greatest desire.

That, of course, bears no relation to the meaning of the term "unborn." "Unborn" does not mean unborn. It means "not yet born human being." As such, it is a begging the question term in a political argument. The abortion argument, after all, is not an argument about when life begins. No one is fool enough to say that the zygote isn't alive. The argument about abortion is about when "human life" and "separate human life" from a legal standpoint begins. The term "unborn" suggests that there is a "person" in there, waiting. It therefore presupposes the answer to this question of whether a fetus is a "person" or a collection of cells. If you use the term "unborn," you are very definitively stating that the lump is not a part of the mother, that it is a person who simply has not yet experienced birth.

The abortion "argument" will never be solved by science, because the question is not scientific. The question is purely legal: when is something attached to the mother's body not the mother's body? When is the potentiality an actuality? These are questions palliated, slightly, by holding to standards such as "viability" (when can a fetus survive being removed from the placenta?), but those questions are only attempts at achieving the real need: social consensus on a social designation.

I assume everyone has her or his own position on the matter. I do not. I haven't a clue. I know that I won't have to have an abortion, and I know that I wouldn't want one, but that's about all I know.

The odd thing about "unborn," though, is that it was conceived and delivered in politics. It was a very precise statement of a position, and yet the news media have employed it, as they have generally given the anti-abortion forces more camera time than those in favor of the status quo, and now we see the term being used generically to mean "fetus." Congresses in various states and in Washington D.C. have attempted to normalize the term, as well, by passing laws making it a crime to kill an "unborn" human in the commission of a crime (e.g. killing a pregnant woman makes you guilty of two murders). These measures seem superficially acceptable -- who doesn't think it's worse to kill a gravid woman than otherwise? -- but they sneak in the concept that fetuses have the same protections as the born.

The point is that this political term, this rather nonsensical one, that was so obviously a statement of beliefs, has gone somewhat neutral.

There is a movie out now called "The Unborn." The premise of the film is that, once upon a time, a woman was pregnant with twins, but only one of them survived in utero and was born. The one that did not survive then haunts and strips naked the living one for ninety minutes. The film is directed by Michael Bay, so you know it's deep.

Now, there is something profoundly odd about this premise. I have nothing against spectacle. Ok, I do, but not every time. However, there is some seriously odd metempsychosis being implied here. So, we have a fetus that has a soul. We have another fetus with a soul. Sketchy...but alright. Now, one twin gets more nutrients from the placenta than the other. Alright: this happens frequently, and it's why our hearts are broken so regularly by the runt of the litter. The term "unborn" is here obviously a euphemism for "stillborn" or "aborted." The villain in the film is stillborn or aborted.

So far, although it's a rather icky thing, we're dealing with a familiar, natural, and infinitely sad question of reality, except that, in this case, the "unborn" child is literally unborn. It goes back. The soul that migrated into the zygote must go "back" to wherever it would have migrated from, and, from that perch, start looking for other types of "birth," such as possessing precocious ten year olds, mirrored glass, and shower stalls.

How odd is it that we have "unborn" used as a euphemism for natural abortion or failure to thrive or stillbirth, and then extend that to the idea of a soul hanging around, looking for a body, and then getting royally annoyed by the wait for flesh?

"No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one." -- E. M. Cioran

"Birth," in the context of this movie's discourse, has nothing to do with gestation. It is purely a matter of some sort of pre-existing entity that employs a mother and father as a method. The problem there, and I know some of the eschatologically minded will be annoyed that I say this, is that it is, prima facia, absurd.

Why do I single them out, when I could be annoying many more people than that? Well, a lot of people have a very, very particular understanding of the anti-Christ. They believe that the anti-Christ is an already-existing entity that dwells in Hell and who will be born in a sinister mirroring of the Incarnation. I will take no time arguing with them that they are wrong or resting on incredibly slender theological legs. The actual Incarnation is special, because Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit. I do not in any way accord Satan equality with God, and therefore I do not see how there was the Word and an anti-Word from the beginning. If Satan is going to have a child, I think it's going to have to be by possession or infusing with infernal soul, and not be incarnation.

You see, sperm and egg unite and create a nearly always unique combination of genes that are further expressed in pretty unique ways due to conditions in utero. Whatever the creature is who results from fertilization, he or she needed both sets of genetics to get there. If he goes back, he goes away. So, if there is a soul that waits for parents to be expressed, then it's only a soul, not a "person." In Michael Bay's profound cinematic universe, though, it's a creature, and Mommy was merely a way station.

Mothers and fathers are only carrying cases? This takes the assumptions of "unborn" to the most irrational position it has ever occupied.

Last on the ship

Note: I had hoped, prayed, and even believed that I would be done with the character sketches. It's a nasty business, even if "Difficile est satiram non scribere" (Juvenal, Satire I, 30). However, they come to me: I do not go in search of them.

"He that complies against his will,
Is of his own opinion still." -- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

There are professional disciplines that have gotten into the habit of experiencing revolutions. "Revolution" and "habit" should be antonyms, but, for some, the cycle of revolution is roughly the same as the cycle of rank-and-tenure committee appointments. I am not talking about the tiresome, petty, pettifogging tedium of "theory" of any sort, either.

Harold Bloom is the saint, in a way, and the visionary of the perpetual revolution. I do not mean to suggest that the phenomenon waited for The Anxiety of Influence or the egoism of "strong readings" to begin, but he is the Ann Coulter of avid sniping in academics. As you will recall, Bloom suggested that each poet despises the previous generation's greatest poets. He related this to a sort of Oedipal struggle: each generation of poets has to kill its daddy to have its mommy, although I never did figure out what consummation was devoutly wished in Bloom's scheme. Without the prospect of having the desired mother, it's not really an Oedipal struggle: it's homicide. However, the book stated a widely observed truth in new lingerie, so it worked for him:

"Envy's a sharper spur than pay.
No author ever spar'd a brother;
Wits are game-cocks to one another. -- John Gay, Fables

The point is that some professions have to have new ideas, because new ideas, not the application of old ideas, are easier to recognize and make greater headlines. Of all of the fields riven by perpetual tumult, the most astonishing to me is Education. I recall being told, authoritatively, that the traditional classroom is a disease, an act of aggression, an offense against liberty, equality, and sensibility, that it is, additionally, a method by which no one may learn. (This sentiment, by the way, is commonplace. It may be surprising to anyone not taught "pedagogy," but consensus is universal that the one thing that can never work is the method of Aristotle's Academy.) I thought it was an astonishing thing to hear, and I suspected that the person telling it to me could not possibly believe it, as he had himself been the product of the traditional classroom. Was he telling me that, in fact, he was uneducated?

This is a widely held belief, as I said, and I'm not going to defend the "stand and deliver" lecture or the "sage on a stage" or the other commercial jingles that get sung. I don't much care. If there is some superior method, I want it. I'm sure most teachers approach their goals with as much vigor as possible, strive as diligently as they are able, and devote as much of their lives to educating as the world will afford them, and I doubt the good will of no teacher. I cannot say the same, however, of a field that achieves its revolutions solely by questioning the motives, methods, and intelligence of every previous practitioner of the trade.

"It is tiresome to hear education discussed, tiresome to educate, and tiresome to be educated." -- Attrib. William Lamb

What I find particular and noisome about the recent revolutions in Education is that they all begin with the premise that each and every colleague is a fool, at best, or a dupe of the Empire. This is a horrid thing to think, and it is fated to produce intolerant individuals and either low morale or low individuality. A person whose starting point is the conclusion that all other individuals are knowing or unknowing villains is going to see himself or herself as a hero who must achieve by defeating the rest. It is a philosophy that does not demand tyrants and bullies but which is a welcome fit for them.

The other factor in recent Education that makes for discomfort, for me and for many, is the external pressure of what No Child Left Behind means. It is very, very hard to find a defense of NCLB. It is a mooncalf. The only defenses I have seen were, in fact, defenses of selected portions, vague aims and goals of the thing. It is otherwise universally dispraised, and rightly. That said, even those who most despise the thing seem to have adopted its central message: documentation and statistical evaluation is the only valid method of assessing education.

This is a shocking thought, if you're not trained in Pedagogy.

Reader, think for a moment. Can you prove that you are educated? Can you come out of a meeting and statistically validate the amount of the message you have absorbed? Can you prove not only that you have learned, how much you have learned, but at what pace? What about pointless meetings? If a meeting seems pointless to you, a waste of your time, would you still be able to weigh, measure, describe, and quantify the information you got from it?

This is the same of education. Just as some meetings seem "stupid," so some classes seem that way to students. Is it because the class is stupid, or because it's not applicable? Are all educational processes equally efficacious with all humans at all times? If they are not, is that the fault of the educational method? Is it, in fact, a fault at all? Well, the formalist (it does not deserve to be called "empiricist") rage in Education assumes a "Yes" to all of these questions and, in fact, demands it.

For twenty years or so, state secondary education has moved to more and more "proof" of education, and "proof" is a number. The naive, hopeless belief in numbers is either charming or jaw dropping, depending upon how far away from it one is, but it is everywhere. Whether it comes out of a "CYA" impulse or some genuine belief that "Johnny Can't Read" because Johnny's teachers haven't filed their lesson plans with the District Office on North Avenue in time, it is a legal and institutional imperative now -- an imperative that has folded into the core of educational philosophy and pedagogical pedagogy.

I hope to bore you less, always, and, believe it or not, this really is a character sketch. I needed to establish these features only to explain the environmental conditions necessary to create a particular character (or to foster such a character).So, let's assume that a profession now encourages all of its stars to believe that they are the sole possessors of the truth and that all of their colleagues are hideous affronts. Let us assume a profession that encourages its leaders to look at all other departments as obstacles. Add to this a true believer in quantification. Quantification is not, of course, the philosophy, but it is the background against which all philosophies must emerge. The individual star of Education may believe in peer-centered-education, holistic grading, computer-mediated-communication, the curriculumless classroom, or whatever else, but each and every one will either be predicated on the need for forms or will have as a part of its core the generation of forms and, most importantly, compliance among all practitioners.

It would not be surprising, then, if someone who is drawn to such a field were a bully, common or uncommon. It would not be surprising if a person drawn to it were an expert at passive-aggression or the carefully lodged complaint. This is not because the study of education is in any sense wrong, but only of the dual functions of tenure depending upon revolutionary ideas and the external pressure to ossify education, the verb, into a noun that fits on a spread sheet.

Personally, I have had three Professional Educators (meaning people in charge of setting educational policy) that I have worked near (never with, because one only works for or near such a person), and all three of them have been tyrannical. I do not say this with hyperbole, and I am not particularly anti-authoritarian. I am not given to taking umbrage much, either. However, I do believe that I received education, and I recall both lecture and discussion and group discussion, and I recall that none of those methods mattered a whit, except that each was what the educator felt most inclined toward. I also realize that my education lagged quite a bit behind my classes, that no one, least of all me, could have said what I had learned from any class, that "learning" was something that could only be assessed in recollection.

What I write, above, is not intended as an indictment of this or that person, but, rather, a warning about a social phenomenon that is, at present, either creating or drawing persons who, in the name of Education, forget the goal, forget knowledge, forget freedom, forget talents, and turn to the method, the method first and last, and hope to achieve not enlightenment, but obedience. These are people who will produce data, not information.

The Dangers of Tuberculosis

In the original, 1967 film "Bedazzled," Mephistopheles, played by Peter Cook, urges a pigeon to defecate on a vicar. He explains to Stanley/Faust, played by Dudley Moore, that he gets a two-for-one that way: pride from the pigeon and wrath from the vicar. You see, the real danger of evil is that it provokes more evil. This is something Proverbs knew well, and so did the author of the Letter of Peter.

However, when one works in the Tower, nothing is more common than the Spanish Cloister's ground molars or the slap fight of impotent malice. I have always watched these dramas from the sidelines. Lord knows, I've gotten in my fair share and more of them in various online incarnations, and I'm glad, in a way, for the nights of insomnolent rage at various arguments with assorted dullards on useless bulletin boards and the tiresome Mobius strip arguments I had on Wikipedia. These gave me an inoculation against some of the more trivial games of the workplace. This is important, because these spit contests at work have grave consequences, while those online grunt-and-heave fights have nothing behind them or ahead of them, really. Melanie Klein argued that the real value of art was that it allowed for a fantasy realm in which we may safely work out the impulses that are too dangerous for reality. At least I remember that as being her sentiment. It could have been Antonin Artaud, for all I know. That I take to be the value of online argument, too.

However, some diseases are worse than others. In particular, one must avoid Typhoid, Cholera, and Tuberculosis. Typhoid is a disease found most often in Philosophy, English, History, and Political Science departments, although it has been known to strike even law schools. I would include Schools of Education in the list, but I'm not sure, in those cases, where the disease begins and the patient ends -- ignorant as I am about the workings of such places. The primary symptom, though, is fever. It's highly communicable, but there are, of course, carriers. This is what makes the disease dangerous. A person will have an idea -- that all traffic signals are expressions of power designed to destroy the feminine, for example -- and this idea will produce an ague as some grow hot and others do not. Generalized lassitude will eventually occur, as the constant exercise and vexations of the vessels by the fever eliminate all reserves of operating cash and tenure procedings. This can result, ultimately, in paralysis and death. The carriers, in these cases, are those who appear calmest in the storm. They can normally be detected by looking for extra titles after their names. They are not the professor of linguistics, but the Germaine Greer Professor of Applied Linguistic Field Resistance Theory. Two tents, the infected and the uninfected, pop up like mushrooms.

Cholera, at first glance, seems the opposite of typhus. It is not dyssentary, and it is not what happens when departments sit for too long. Instead, it is the private mania. Any academic department can fall victim to this disease, and it is quite fatal. Unlike typhoid, it is not communicable. Victims are not carriers and do not spread it to one another. Instead, they share a single stream of funding, and it allows them to pursue their own interests to the exclusion of all else. The result is that the students become increasingly odious. They are distractions. Maintaining academic disciple becomes difficult. You were hired to teach labor relations in the 20th century, but, you know, that's simply not very interesting anymore. Instead, you really want to do a survey of web comics. You were hired to do the survey class in basic Chemistry, but, after a while, that just seems so empty that you'd rather have your freshmen working on pieces of the puzzle of denaturing high fructose corn syrup. Your colleagues sometimes make you go to meetings, but they're annoying.

Both of these diseases result in death, but the one I had been unprepared for is George Spigott's pigeon: Tuberculosis.I realize that my anatomy lesson is going long, and I don't want to make my parishoners late for lunch, but I really must warn them about the dangers of TB. Tuberculosis seems to be commonplace anywhere there is an existing crisis. It is usually a single-point infection, but it is not called "consumption" for nothing. The primary symptom is an inability for department members to communicate, as tumors choke off the air supply. Effectively, the effort to push aside these tubers causes everything else to grind to a halt, and, eventually, the same lassitude, paralysis, and death occur as in typhoid.

Fever may or may not be present, but TB gets inside and immediately insinuates itself into the function of the metabolism. If a person steps into a crisis by volunteering to sort things out, then that person achieves an indispensible position, whether qualified or not. TB, in academia and business, is when a person becomes the conduit for everything, and yet no one remembers ever deciding to cede that power or those decisions. This person may or may not bring a Big Idea or Grand Unifying Theory or Major Task. It isn't necessary. All that is necessary is that staffing be insufficient or funding be insufficient. As those two conditions are pandemic, all patients are vulnerable to an infection by TB. In the name of exigency, emergency, or efficiency, tubers spread across the whole body. What's amazing is the inexorable and sluggish nature of death.

We need not read The Magic Mountain to know how agonizing a death by TB is. It takes years, causes inordinate attention, requires vast armies of helpers, and results, in the end, in death. It is like age itself in the way that it marches forward, grabbing more and more of the vital systems, until the cells are either cut away or die on their own.

I confess, I have always been, like the vicar, given to wrath in the presence of those tumors. They are now infecting me, and I have begun to loathe the very idea of them. I shall seek peace of heart and mind, but I hope not indifference to injustice. The balance is a fine one, and I accept all good wishes toward finding it.

If...

If I had a hammer, I'd hit my thumb with it every day. That would be justice, the danger.

If I had a bell, I'd take out the clapper. Bells are more interesting when they cannot ring, when their gentle parabola clangs the louder without a peal.
If I had a song, I'd sample it and make it a pre-programmed setting for the latest Studio Magic (TM) console. That way, I could be sure to infect every hit single without once having to perform for anyone.

If I had a hammer, I'd break the cell phones, just to see who lives inside them.

If I had a sword, I'd fall on it.

Accidental Leisure

As is customary with me, I used part of my leisure time to think about ontology. Of all aspects of metaphysics, I find it the most becoming. Part of this is that I have been haunted, ever since I met him, by my never-met mentor, Odo Marquard, and his essay on the "accidental." He and his generation of Germans had a powerful reason to feel anxiety about the distinction between purpose and accident, between existing and being, and his lovely books emerged at a time when Americans, at the end of the last century, were ready to feel as unhappy with the "splinter in your mind."

Oh, post-mortism had already been announced, practiced, perfected, and become pop culture by then. "History is a flat field" -- yes, yes, how fun. "Fragments are made into wholes by the unifying consciousness" -- quite endearing, that. "Existentialism has run its course, and now we're all ironic" -- no doubt, but do you mean it? Scientists had even joined the chorus. It's a wave! It's a particle! It's two great things in one. Yes, they had their pave or their wart-icle. Whatever it was, they had it, and then they wanted to have it some more. Why? Because they could.

It has been an age of proliferating unnecessary causes. You can put power generation near the consumer, or you can get superconductors in your power cables. You can regulate speculation in energy and reclassify it as a staple good, or you can go way the heck out in the ocean to drill. You can try very, very hard to "make it new" and come up with new imagery that is both communicative and discursive, or you can have Richard Nixon playing marbles with Mussolini in Trieste, while Enrico Fermi plays flute in the background. (Don't get me wrong: Tom Stoppard is the best of them.) It's not that any of these warticles or post-mortist achievements is not worth the effort, but each and every blinkin' one of them is somehow more effort than achieve, and each is more testimony to a nervous will than a desire.

(It was a clever idea, having the
font color taken from Britney
Spears's tanned midriff, but
it didn't work too well.)

I have been thinking, in my unhappy way, that all the explanations fail. So has everyone else. For a few years, now, I have taken the approach that accidents proliferate to such a degree as to prove an unconscious intent. In other words, if we sum all of the accdidental actions, all of the things people are unaware that they are doing, and if we add in all of the chance conditions of existence (time of birth, meeting the right significant other or not, meeting the right or wrong temptation, the irrational time you punched a friend), then we get a meaning. It is not a satisfactory meaning, of course, for that would give a great equals sign and "balance the equation" (to keep the Matrix allusions).

It's a warticle, and we're trapped in it.

We live in an age fated to be accident prone. More to the point, we are determined to be determined, insistent upon insisting our will be obeyed. We will have more post-mortem novels, more plays with John Donne sung by Robert Oppenheimer, more dances done in mechanics coveralls, more poems made up of soup can labels, more superconducting children's toys, more bathos and extremity. In this constant yoking of absurdities together, in this violent joining of impossibilities, we will declare ego sum. More importantly, we will say, "Though there is no purpose, there is my achievement, and it passes the time."

More place holders

The above image is from Wikimedia Commons.

I keep wanting to provide the Chapter on Buttons. The previous post's question was in anticipation of that. However, like Tristram Shandy, the more I put it off, the harder it is to get around to doing because, like him, other things occur to me instead. If I decide not to write them, because I want to write the Chapter on Buttons, then that just makes us wait around with nothing, thereby losing the interest of the few readers I gathered in November.

So, while I'm waiting for the energy, time, and interest to write on buttons, I have just two quick things.

1. All the time that I was a very young boy, I dreamed of the ability to become a bird. This is not an unusual fantasy. In fact, it is a cliche or an archetype, one. However, like all humans everywhere, I dreamed of becoming a noble eagle (not Don Henley or Joe Walsh, then), or a sharp winged hawk. I have now changed my mind. If I were a bird, I'd be a buzzard.
2. I have decided that, all things considered, left-hand drive is the superior configuration for cars.

As for #1, I wrote last year about how eating is murder ("For whom the dinner bell tolls"), how this is an unresolved moral equation for any one, whether ancient or modern. Well, I was thinking that buzzards have a great many advantages over eagles and hawks. In addition to no one ever naming a rock band or literary society after them, buzzards haven't very much competition. You don't hear of other animals working for a day and a half for a chance to eat a buzzard. In fact, vultures in general can land in the middle of a crowd of feeding lions and be ignored. (Probably the lions are wrinkling their noses and complaining about how ugly the vultures are.)

Additionally, they get to eat and breed and nest without any guilt. They wait for things to die on their own and then go clean up. They do a service to all the other animals.

Even the subject of their grotesque features is overplayed. Yesterday, I saw a flock of buzzards overhead. I had never before seen more than six buzzards on the wing, but I saw a supercolony of buzzards circling. There had to be more than two dozen. Say what you want about how thin their necks are, how wrinkled their faces, how vile their eating habits, buzzards are actually beautiful on the wing. The stringent V of their wings, the effortless soaring, and even the powerful flapping are all quite pleasing.

Cars?

Well, the left hand side drive is obviously superior. By pinning the driver's left arm against the door, left hand side drive allows the driver to swat children, repel or explore passengers, and fish for dropped CD's with the right hand. Imagine having to do all of that with the left: the children would be bratty, the passengers licentious or chaste, and the fumbled lighters and CD's would pile up on the car floor. It's a horrible thought.

(Oh, and the chapter on buttons is actually going to be, eventually, a discussion of the neurotic codes of nudity and cloud cuckoo land of empiricism gone mad that bedevils contemporary culture.)

Pop Quiz

This is in anticipation of my next post, a single question.

Instructions: Answer the following questions on your own paper. Please skip lines, write legibly, and use black pixels. The questions are closed book. Do not use any reference work or notes to answer.

1. What song was Janet Jackson singing at the Super Bowl when she experienced a "wardrobe malfunction?"

---------

Curious questions

Oh, good heavens, some people are on the BBC just now trying to employ the evolutionary model to ideas. "The good ideas survive, and the bad ones do not," the speaker says, only to be interrupted by a literary critic who says that the "good book" is not the one that sells and that culture doesn't work this way, and then another speaker wants to apply infant analogies. Whee!

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one that is most adaptable to change." - Charles Darwin

So, "survival of the fittest" <--> "fitness is health" <--> "health is strength" <--> "fitness is the strength" :: "Survival of the strongest is evolution." Thus does "evolution" mean the opposite of what Darwin said it meant, mean more what Hitler said it meant.

What a bunch of galloops. The book or idea that flourishes is the one that most nearly satisfies its cultural moment. On this, the Darwinian and Marxist and Hegelian analysts would agree. Thus, the idea that flourishes is the one that responds most nearly to what the cultural vaccuum is.

I didn't want to write about that, though. No. I have a dearth of e-mail and friends right now, in my time of need, and so I convulsed about what I heard on the radio instead of any matter of genuine concern.

My last got no readers at all, so my blog is definitely heading in the right direction. If the trend continues, this will actually get some unreaders, and that's what I want to ask about.

I grew up in the Watergate generation. This is an important thing. While, since then, there have been other opportunities (the Iran-Contra generation, for example, or the Alberto Gonzales generation), the Watergate generation is that time when aware and yet gullible young people, say ten to fifteen years of age, could watch television all together and see the President lying, stealing, and pilfering for the slightest political advantage. It was a moment that marked all of the intelligent and aware of my generation with either superior cynicism or furious faith.

I was, therefore, one of millions who learned early on the philosophy of realpolitik. Knowing that states act always on matters of gain and interest, rather than belief and philosophy, has served me very, very well. It helped me realize, for example, that Edward Teller's funding pipedream of the x-ray laser (aka the Strategic Defense Initiative, aka "Star Wars") upset the Soviets because the thing absolutely sucked as a missile defense but was an absolute beauty when it came to vaporizing people from outerspace. It helped me see that Iran-Contra was itself a burp, where philosophy dominated interests and thereby screwed up both the philosophy and the interests. It helped me realize how the invasion of Panama might well be more in line with The Panama Deception than the saving of a Navy captain's wife from harassment.

It has failed me, though. My cynicism and my analysis have failed me entirely, however, with the invasion of Iraq.

What I want from the Obama administration is an explanation of why we did it. I'm serious. I have been waiting for six years for an explanation that could survive a third grader's analysis.

What has infuriated me is how outrageously flimsy the explanations have been. It's not that they're lies: we expect lies when it comes to a causus belli, but it's that they're so obviously lies that they beg us to supply our own reasons, and no one has been able to supply one. Panama deception? No. Misdirection? No. Oil? No. To sneak up on Russia or Iran? No.

What is infuriating about the invasion of Iraq to me is not that it was foolish, disgraceful, immoral, and disasterous, but that the proferred reasons don't make sense, and even the most cynical and sinister conspiracy theories don't make sense, either. In fact, what I want to know is why we invaded, because there actually is no reason at all for it. Tell me that we wanted an outpost for Aramco, and I'll feel better. Tell me that it was to enrich Dick Cheney, and I'll feel better. Tell me even that it was a plot to kill poor people the world over, and I'll feel better.

Please, President Obama, don't leave it as it is, where there is no reason at all for this sacrifice, this disaster, this atrocity, this corrosion of all that we hold dear about ourselves and all we want to protect in our collective soul. Even a paranoid reason would be better than lies and nonsense.

In Memoriam

My last blog post got exactly one reader, so this one will be another ray of sunshine.

This is a guilt trip town I'm in. I'm quite susceptible to guilt, but not usually of blame. I am a teetering mass of guilt, but always about failure, not crime. There is a difference. If you tell me that I've done something badly and I don't agree, I won't be bothered at all. However, if I, myself, think I did something badly, then you will be unable to convince me not to feel guilt.

The thing is, this is a guilt trip town, and by that I mean that drivers tailgate.

If you drive a car and there is traffic, you might feel as if you are walking along a sidewalk. You have to get around people who are wandering, have to avoid making eye contact with bullies, and all the rest. Inevitably, though, you feel the constant pressure. There is a pressure from people behind you, people beside you, to move, to go faster, to go slower, to change lanes, to stay put, to stop, to go, to go from the redlight more quickly, or not so quickly. Traffic gets on our nerves because of all of those expectations. We're all always being looked at and urged. There are only two choices on the road: press or be pressed. If you are in a hurry, and all of those idiots are in your way, then your anger and assertive reactions are aimed like rays of hatred out at all the other people. You glare, glower, and grimace as you go. If, though, you achieve your ideal speed (the speed you would go if no one else were around), then you feel pressure. All those people are hating at you, and it's not nice.

When I lived in North Carolina, the characteristic driving habit of the entire state was to get into the middle lane, if there were three, or the left lane, if there were two or four lanes to choose from. People got onto the highway and immediately went to the left lane, and there they stayed. "The left lane was good enough from grandpa, and I reckon I'll stay until God calls me home," they'd say. It was an article of faith for each and every driver that left lanes were "normal" for people going 45 mph and 95 mph alike. The middle lane mania, on the other hand, was for people going a "normal" speed. The people who thought they were middle class whether taking home $25,000 or $400,000 a year also thought they were "middle" drivers, neither fast nor slow.

Where I am now, though, the defining characteristic is tailgating. I'm not exaggerating when I say this, either. Whether it's a teen or a senior, the driver follows at 10' or less. Furthermore, it is not, as you and I might have expected, a matter of speed. On a commute, I get to a passing lane. Since I drive five miles per hour over the speed limit, I feel like I'm in no one's way, and yet I customarily have two or three SUV's (or, as they were recently called, "FUV's") riding each other's, and my, tail. When I get to the passing lane, I feel a sense of relief: they will pass me and go about their busy days without threatening me. However, they don't pass. They stay there, tailgating, because that's "normal" for them.

The effect of being tailgated all the time is to feel the weight of another person's anger all the time, to feel in the way, all the time, to feel hated, all the time. I do not respond to that person's criminalizing gaze, but I do respond to the anger and come away agreeing that I'm all alone, despicable. It's a guilt trip town.

Along the state highway, there is a very, very large field. It is perhaps 20-40 acres of furrows, usually growing peanuts, I believe. For months, I had seen two stray dogs out in that field. They would play the way that only two yearling dogs without owners could play, with utter joy. I would drive by, and they would be within ten yards of the highway, jumping in the air, twisting their necks as if catching a Frisbee, and play biting each other.

Yesterday, I was driving down the road, and there was the dandruff of cotton boles all along the median, as the autum crop had been taken in. The leaves are down, now, or falling, and so there are pixels of color amid the brown and broom sage orange of the fields, and the soil's shoulders switches from the cut pumpkin color of the northern half of the state to the sandy gray of the coast, and there, at the edge of the road, was one of those dogs, dead.

I cannot blame the drivers, nor the people who abandoned the dogs a year ago. The dog had been annihilated by the strike, and so it is extremely unlikely that he had much suffering to do. Instead, his death had been most probably as sudden as his life, but it's a town of guilt, of sadness, and of raw cut death, and I remember and mourn that pair of strays.

Footfalls

So, what has been going on? Well, I have been having a back ache from the cold butter knife Death has been jabbing me with, and I have made the transition from a blissful and busy worker to a very, very unhappy one, all with a single day's belch of miasma in my direction. I'm rather weary of egos that are like the thing that may never be filled (Proverbs 30:15-16).

I spent a good amount of time, or rather a bad amount of time, sorting through the horde of wrongs I had done and the reasons I had for suffering, thinking that the solution would be the grand quietus, but, of course, that is not satisfaction. That is cessation. Satisfaction is in going from comfortable and collegial to surveilled and disconcerted. The problem, of course, is in knowing or even speculating upon what it is that is doing the accounting. If it's just me, as the OT VIII's would say, then to Hell with it (get it? that's clever). If it's some cosmic compter, then I'd like to know when, exactly, meekness will pay off or why I'm not enjoying the payoff, or if that failure to enjoy the fruits is itself another debit in the column. If the frame of reference is grander and more intelligent and loving than that, then I'm in the world I know. In the divine realm, suffering is neither good nor bad. It is irrelevant, by itself.

That's right: I said that suffering is irrelevant, and so is death.If you think about things, then you really don't have any alternative but to think that death, and consequently its presagements, are neither good nor bad. I do not mean that they lack value. They certainly have both value to the one doing the dying, suffering, and grieving, and they have meaning, but they cannot be moral. Morality requires free will and choice between that which is obedient to the good (or God) and that which is not. One thing we know very well is that not a blasted, blighted, benighted one of us has the least choice in ailing, perceiving the ailment (suffering), and dying.

I could extend this to an imitation of Donne's Thoughts upon Emergent Occasions and paint suicide and suicidal behavior in the shimmering light of over-analysis, but that would be as illogical as believing that death is a special act. Donne understood death better than we do, I think, for he never protested it nor welcomed it. Life builds up, and death takes away, and so each death is a reduction until the final reduction. By that time, one needs to have a new lease elsewhere, a new home. However, at the same time, every creature is born to a death sentence. Logic is enough, even in such darkness, to illuminate one fact: nothing can be special if it is shared by every creature that is or ever has been. It does not actually come sooner to the good or the bad, and disease certainly does not care about the virtues of its hosts. There are things we can do to make this event more or less likely at a moment, but the fact is that we are all driving or driven by a machine whose wheels are about to come off.

If you are at peace with these facts or raging or wailing or smiling, it makes no difference. It is simply a topic that does not welcome or even allow thought. Thinking about your own individual extinction on earth is almost impossible. It is like trying to remember a pain you have felt: you can summon up the fact of the pain, but not the experience, and, just so, you can think of and acknowledge the fact of your death, but not think about it. This is how nature made us, and it shows the hand of the divine.

Think about this. If we cannot imagine zero or infinity, either one, then the instruction is to live, and in living to accumulate life. What is it that makes us live? That which is most lively, is, no doubt, loving, but so is pleasing and being pleased. This has been my thought, anyway, my philosophy.

So, about being meek. I am not meek. I've never been meek. I've given up, though, on struggling against the deeply seated manias of others. There is no reform possible, when what they are doing is born out of their needs rather than their reason. Thus, the ego that may never be filled is best avoided, like an event horizon. Thus, if someone has plans for every other person to do this and that and this other thing to glorify his own shining heart of gold, then the best thing is to be invisible. Once spotted, sucked, dragged, and crushed, though, there is nothing better to do but try to find the comfort, no matter how cold. Look up. Look down. Look somewhere, but try to find the thing that is still living.

Txtme l8tr

"You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come;
Knock as you please, there's nobody at home." -- Alexander Pope

"All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.
Let us alone." -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Lotos Eaters."

People speak idly of the importance of the computer. The computer, they say, has changed our lives, and they are correct. The computer has changed our daily lives profoundly. Imagine how frequently one interacts with a computer without knowing it. The obvious computers are in our mental inventories of daily life, but there are dozens a day that are hidden inside cars, cash registers, inventory systems, telephones, televisions, radios, stereos, security tags, and toys. Most of these computers do in a smaller or faster form what had already been done by other technology before them.

It's amazing to me that folks don't automatically grasp the unmistakable and unshakable truth of Marshal McLuhan's thesis on technology. If you don't have it in your mental hands, then click that link and read. The store dick's eyes are replaced by the security tag, but the function is the same. The car has a chip that does what the garage's gauges and meters did, and those did what the eyes and ears formerly did. The chip makes the doggie toy articulate in a way that is less expensive and more reliable than the clockwork did.

The obvious computers are another matter. These do "new" things (well, somewhat), but not because of what they achieve. The obvious computer -- the one you are sitting before right now -- lets you read my essay. Reading an essay is something you could have done with the old analog magazine. Afterwards, you may flip through the stacks of other magazines and call it the web, or you may use e-mail and replicate mail and the telephone. If not, you might decide to play a game, but the game is going to be, at its most revolutionary, a replication of Dungeons and Dragons or some other pen and paper extension of imaginary play.

". . . the Brain, in its natural position and State of Serenity, disposeth its Owner to pass his Life in the common Forms, without any Thought of subduing Multitudes to his own Power, his Reasons, or his Visions. . . . " -- Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub

What's interesting about the obvious computer is the way it does things. It is the technology itself that is the change, not the destination or action of the technology. The screen, the mouse, the keyboard, the speakers, the track ball, the super-duper extenso-glove... these are the things that are different. Even though each of these is as clearly as it can be an imitation of the body, each is distinctly a layer of intervention and reorganization. These things change the human brain and the neurology of communication. People fret about how these things are goinig to affect children, and they should be worrying as much about how these things have already affected each of us in the Computer Age.

All the worry is misplaced. You want to worry? Worry about the cell phone. The cell phone is both more ubiquitous and more dangerous than the computer, when it comes to reprogramming the human animal. Steve Jobs can show his two-year old playing with an Apple and figuring it out, and that youngster can grow up to be cognitively secure, but what about the cell phone?

The telephone doesn't mean anything to me, much. It's fine. Bell is good. However, the cell phone says that you are always at home. It says that you must always be home. It interrupts anything, and thereby it creates a new foreground activity. Instead of being the object that you use when you want to reach out to someone else, its constant presence and constantly-on status means that the cell phone is your job, and your job is an interruption. Because it might go off at any moment, it is always, in your brain, ahead of any activity you are engaged in.

That cell phone is not an extension. It inverts McLuhan's paradigm, because you are its extension.

Am I exaggerating? Well, think about the text message. "Texting" is now not only a greater addiction than Keno, but it's more of an infection than the Spanish flu. We know that a train driver killed twenty-five people because he was texting, but he is only famous, not unique. Ok, so people have done the Cassandra act about texting while driving, and now Cassandra's keening has been ignored by the at risk, but let's be serious about it. I have not only been tailgated by teen drivers in SUV's, but I have been tailgated by brain damaged teens who were composing text messages and reading them. Look in the rear view mirror. See the hands perched on top of the wheel? Hit the gas as hard as you can and try to put miles between you and it, or make the next turn and wait for ten minutes. It won't help, of course, because the next driver behind you will be doing the same thing.


I worry about my safety, of course, and I worry a bit about the cancer risks, but what I really, really worry about is the brain inside that benumbed skull back there. Think about what the text message does.

I can testify in court about its effects on language. i can say tht u are rly messed up by it. I have seen students actually hand in for a grade papers with "u" in them. I'm through with seeing "thru." These shortcuts are not orthographic reform, and they are not a "new language." While the "emoticon" has some claim to being a linguistic feature, "LOL" and "ROFLMAO" and the like have become nervous ticks, not communication.

More, though, I am concerned about this metacommunity that is in the foreground. It is an actual hivemind without any thinking being done. The text message is hostile to thought. One cannot actually work out a full proposition in a format that only allows a few pricey characters, and one cannot have intellectual precision in a medium that punishes vocabulary. As Americans have reduced their working vocabularies to a mere ten thousand words, the text message reduces that further. Hence, what the constant text does is not enable a constantly communicating mentality, but a constantly "in touch" community.

When my dog was a puppy, she used to lie in bed beside me. Dogs do not like body-to-body contact the way that humans do, but they do have to touch, and my dog would sleep next to me with a toe nail touching my leg. She had to have contact, but no big mushy hug. That's what the cell phone has done. It has sacrificed, if not obliterated, communication, and it has enforced a constant touch. It is somehow fetal, somehow regressive, and it is, I think, addictive precisely because it allows for an undifferentiated ego.

I'm sorry that I've gone so long on this. I'm bored, so ttyl.

Sentiment and Sentimentality

I'm writing today because I'm sick and tired of looking at my McDonald's grumble. It may be well written, but I've gotten all the notice I'm ever going to get. Another rose petal tossed down the infinitely deep well of the Internet, and I have yet to make a splash.

There are topics (topoi) that the old Rhetoric classes used to teach. I'm currently teaching a very elementary writing class, and so I've been reacquainted with the concept of the "prompt." The "prompt" is what the topos became, only with a great deal less poetry and metaphysics than in the past. Where students used to write on, "What is a just war?" or "What is the difference between the naked and the nude?" or "Does the citizen have a right to rebel?" (I know no one ever clicks on any links, but that last one is very tricksy, as it is Melville bragging about a particularly illegal naval battle), we now ask them to write about "What makes you happy?" and "What is your favorite room?"

When I went off to seminary, to become a priest of geeks, and when I stood in the antechamber to the tabernacle, I noticed that there were many there with me, and these persons, having intelligence for piety, were judged fit. However, I regarded them as loathesome. They were in their mid-twenties and obsessed with being cool for once in their lives. Having been the oblongs and conic sections in their high schools, and therefore being robbed of being fit enough, manly enough, pretty enough, or smoothe enough, they had a lack they carried about with them. They needed to be cool now. Now, the competition was similar people. Now, they could open the cover of their chests and let the vaccuum of their egos go at full blast.

We all agreed, or had it agreed for us, that the contest would be aesthetics. Who had best taste won. Who had the coolest stuff won.

These people were, I thought, on the verge, at any moment, of giving one another swirlies. (Don't believe me? Look here, and you can see someone actually agreeing to have one in order to be cool.)

They had big hierarchies of cool bands and uncool bands, and they had huge arguments of how awful particular things were. One of the things they hated was Simon and Garfunkel. A person couldn't listen to that. On the other hand, Nick Cave was cool. Don't even mention Harry Chapin.

Well, you know, I think it's time to innoculate people and revive the topos tradition. There is a vast difference between sentiment and sentimentality.

"Gazes mournfully at trees
And barely a sound until tomorrow" ("See Emily Play," Syd Barret)

Those lines are phonetically brilliant, and they're also very pathetic. The "cool" Syd and the sentimental are married in one there, if a person has ears to listen. A person can make fun of Paul McCartney all he wants (and he wants to quite a bit), but the man who wrote "For No One" while in his twenties has more soul than any detractor. "Eleanor Rigby" is supposed to be saccharined drivel, but it sure as hell isn't.

What is the difference, then, between sentiment and sentimentality? Sentimental writing plays up easy emotions and is coercive and achieves commonplace emotions. An artist should write "What oft was thought but ne'er so well express'd" concepts, but if it's commonly expressed as well as commonly felt, then the result will be sentimentality. A good author hits either complex emotions (ambivalence being the top of the pyramid and poignancy being just below that) or finds an emotion that we feel but which we don't know we feel.

Is "Eleanor Rigby" a common emotion? It evokes loneliness, yes, but it also evokes despair and wishes that the world weren't so cold. It combines two lonely people with their fates, and it mourns the fact that they never had connections. Certainly it's not the only time that sentiment has been expressed, but it's not common. No song, and hardly any poem, though, has hit the complete sensation of a person whose girlfriend is crying as she's completely over her love for him as compactly as "For No One."

Even Harry Chapin's "Cat's Cradle" isn't commonplace. It's coercive because it's a narrative, but the sentiment it aims for is not unalloyed. Yes, the speaker is rueful and full of regret, but he also couldn't help it. "Taxi," which is often cited as Chapin's most egregiously sentimental, sins only by its recourse to the silly "flying when I'm stoned" imagery. The situation it evokes is plenty complicated. Yes, the man is sad that he lost his girlfriend, but the situation he is in is uniquely emasculating. He is now her servant, and so his regret is tinged with an utter loss of manhood, too.

No.

Leave me alone. I'm not that far from the fourteen year old who thought that "The Sounds of Silence" was the deepest poem ever. I still think its evocation is deft and its language is precise, and I still think that "Eleanor Rigby"'s tombstone is worth fresh flowers.

Marmor McDonaldiensis

Warning to the reader: the following was written on August 5, 2008, and I had just received a big dictionary of names. The prose is purple, even by my standards. I understand if you skip it for the much better one before.
In other words, even by these standards, it's pretentious.

"The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith." -- T. S. Eliot

"From the cradle to the coffin, underwear comes first." -- Bertolt Brecht

This morning was I morning’s minion, dashing from place to post, bashing against a to-do list as if it were an enemy on the field below. Thus, I had voted in a run-off election to deny its inventors their malicious designs, paid for taxes, renewed special permits with the county, gotten bird seed, milk and cream, bananas, and a double cheeseburger meal before eleven-fifteen. Such was the frenzy that my thoughts dragged in the water behind my actions like a skier, screaming for help.

Then I began to look out upon the world, and especially its women, as is the wont of men my age, with the desperate look of a toothless man in a steakhouse, and I began to look at the traces they made and prophesy.

"The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not." -- George Bernard Shaw, Parents and Children

From the fecund swamp of becoming to the fetid soup of been, we dimly perceiving humans live in and by expectation. We circle back with many fewer questions of “What happened?” than we propel forward, lurching and toppling as we go, with boasts of “Hey! Betcha it’s going to....” “Ecce homo?” This is the expecting animal, moving in advance of life and adjusting. When enough of our trials are not errors, say by the age of fifteen, we animals erect ourselves to prophecy. The teenager sees where things have been for that short span, and from twelve years of data points, it projects the line out to infinity and announces that the world sucks.

However, at nearly the same time, the unpredictable arises and reduces the hit rate and tames the annoying little jerks. They find that the opposite sex, and then the same sex competitors, are formulating rules and expecting expectations, too, and the permutations swarm like black flies, leaching out the certainty and draining the leisure time sport of damning the world. Years pass, and the waters deepen and still, and it is time for the more accurate and much more useless predictions of the middle aged and elderly. They have found algorithms for the unpredictable other sexes and agents, and they announce fates from their perches on Rascal scooters weaving through Wal-Mart aisles.

There, then, at my own mid-day early bird meal, I sat like a prostitute in the window of the McDonald’s. We window sitters are alluring the way that gargoyles are, not like bare flesh, but we are as much solicitous. Ours is the bare rictus of withered age or the bald neuter of obesity or poverty. We perch to see lives and bodies, for we dislike our own. Even though I have found that age only means that my pants and pill box get larger, when I look out, I feel the space between the shell and the core of my life, and I am compelled to ease that pain by longing or dismissal.

There was an Armelle. Her precarious beauty was constructed in layers of anxiety. When I see her, or when I see Solveig beside her, both striding in training heels and spinning about like debutantes at the ball, cell phones extended before them, both balletic and hieratic, I can make my predictions. I see their beginning, and I can extrapolate. If these two bodies remain in the same motion on this same course, they will collide with this Muta and that Gerda. This butterfly goes into chrysalis to produce that ... productive member of society. Similarly, if that raw-shaved boy, that Uiseann, with those embellished arms and jeans (his emblem and shield) takes up the present space for long, he will descend into that cologne-dipped Chamber of Commerce booster, that Peli. His buddy (good buddy), with his scalp reddened by sun and his cuffs frayed by sneaker heels, hurling his hands forward like pistons, grinning like a malevolent spirit with a freshly claimed soul in its teeth, will metamorphose from Vernus to Torbjorn. Older, he will no longer have a head that looks like a blister, and he will trade the overpowered pickup truck (the gas pedal of which he works with his imagined phallus) for an under-occupied SUV, colored rigor mortis blue in a concession to budget, and he will achieve independent importance at last.

[Ed. note: I am going to stop linking at this point:
it takes time and probably doesn't add anything.
If you miss them, let me know in comments.]

"We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed." -- Thomas Fuller

There is nothing wrong with these transformations, and none of these paths of inertia is meaningful by itself. The gargoyle doesn’t have any verdicts. It isn’t about that. The teenager wails that life sucks, but the gargoyle just stares out, wishing that life were still a verb. If there is anything the prophecy does not do, it does not warn. Youngsters, bulbous and fractious, ossify into hortatory masonry, too, after all, but there is one thing only left to say.

God give us the unequal force. These pathways are extensions, and these graves I describe are now just divots, and they come to pass only if there is no unequal force, no blow, no collision, no random factor, and let us praise the entropy that makes life unpredictable and that pries the figures from the wall, chisels down the bas relief, and tilts the table.

We’re not all individual, not all different, unless we get just a bit confused, confounded, and jarred.