Saturday commute ciii: still paint, turning sill

..

Many days in the woods he wonders what it is

that he has for so long hunted down. We go hand

in hand, he thinks, into the dark pleasure,

but we are rewarded alone, just as we are married

into aloneness ..

There is light or more light, darkness and less darkness.

It is, he decides, a quality without definition.

Like the arbitrary silence in the white woods,

leaving tracks in the snow he cannot recognize.

Jack Gilbert

Refusing Heaven

  Not the Happiness but

  the Consequence of Happiness

Knopf, 2005©

Spare us

      Ukraine

Timothy Snyder

NYRB

'as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on the screen'

Failing again the other day,

to read my telephone screen

in the sunshine, either with

polarizing lenses or bare-

back, as it were, should I
have resolved then and there

to investigate an app that

would go on recite to me on

call, such content as I may

care to entertain, selected

from the heaps of inputs to

which we're all subjected?

But it would take fuh-evah

to educate an app in all my

preferences; and possibly,

if there's anything worse

than being nannied, it's

being nannied without be-

ing known. Again, however,

if one were to think about

it, a nanny app to read to

me from my nanny device,

could only carry diminish-

ment to diminishing returns,

which I happen to think, ar-

rived 'long about the same

time as the Touch Screen,

and the enthralling dance

of Cover Flow. Where would
go, unlikelihood?

I ran into a fellow who

struck me as conversant in

devices in the sunshine,

but this was no confidant. 

What peach would read his

Prufrock as incompetent?

How assume the spirit our

devices so distrust? A

most disarming greeting,

yet not a feeble posture,

the genuine condition?

T.S. Eliot

The Love Song

  of  J. Alfred Prufrock

1915

Spare us the rapture for Ukraine

No time is so tricky for any peoples of the world, that the American Right Wing will not condemn an American gov-ernment which does not extend a com-plicating hand. Thus the other day, the Right's senior prince of posture and pusillanimity flexed his perfor-ated nostrils that the nation lacks a nitwit capable of Reaganesque rattling of play sabers, to tweak the head of one nation to exploit the misery of another. I didn't listen because I didn't have to, at how the Murdoch network lent its droolers' chorus to the rousing of Right thinking in our exploited class. Voltaire said, in such a pinch we would have invented God. He hadn't imagined Mark Twain.

Times are hard in Ukraine. The novelty of this condition escapes us all, but the opportunity for mischief is not to be dismissed on grounds of futility. Already the IMF, Odyssean genius for infiltration that it is, has promised gobs of technical assistance and dreamy luscious lucre - only not with-out appropriate reforms, need they say. With such reforms, many a free people has been bent to the capital wheel; and who knows when we shall see Greeks again? Not to be outdone, the American government has said, whatever the IMF will do, it will do gladly. Tories have the best of both worlds: a complaisant American government, to blame when their policies fail.

Saturday commute cii: We still use water

     In the arms race of sport

     great strides have render-

     ed obsolete every element

     in the frame, reaching in-

     to the bloodstream of the

     athlete, himself a novel-

     ty to nature. Yet one can

     not say the race is over,

     or even that it's changed

     materially; and there are

     no counting houses for im-

     materiality.

My favourite clothespin viii

   My favourite clothespin's

   true ally is how daylight

   plays, in buoyancy of air -

   constant and suspenseful.

Imagine a literature of power without force

   The suggestion has

   been reported many

   times. But who can

   ever have prepared

   for freckles to be

   hot in monochrome? 
   
   The effect recalls
   Homer's imagery in
   the Iliad, and one
   can never think of
   its power, without
   Simone Weil's per-
   ception of its or-
   igin in force. The
   discovery of power
   in other means has
   the same parentage
   but is less common.

       The great and characteristic

       point with him was the per-

       fect separateness of his sen-

       sibility. He never saw him-

       self as part of a whole; only 

       as the clear-cut, sharp-edged,

       isolated individual, rejoicing

       or raging, as the case might 

       be, but needing in any case 

       absolutely to affirm himself.

       All this to Rowland was ancient

       history, but his perception of

       it stirred within him afresh at

       the sight of Roderick's sense

       of having been betrayed.

       

Henry James

Roderick Hudson

1874

Harper & Brothers, 1960©

Eric Weiss

Feathers don't knock people over

   On the count of three

   I've been counting on

   the NRA Chorus to fly

   to my rescue, and in-

   tone, People do. Who

   could wish to go for

   very long, fearing an

   implement for its de-

   structiveness, while

   sin lies so close to

   hand? But I was won-

   dering, just now, if

   we were to flood Par-

   is with 40,000 more

   untraceable handguns,

   or 40,000 more anon-

   ymous people, which

   would knock people

   over more, even al-

   lowing for spirited

   motoring? And, would

   the feather remain a

   device of choice for

   anyone's security?

   What is it about the

   syllogism of the NRA, 

   that a feather under-

   mines, if not that it

   blames the victim as

   a virtual accomplice,

   locked in a sectarian

   carousel?