Attraction (Sensation)

Attraction (Sensation)

Parallel: To Magnets. Metaphor, pulled out like taffy until it snaps.
Iron Bars (are to) Men/Women :: Comets (are to) Thermometers/Barometers.

I strode once, weary, up a hill,
and gazed over the crest –
I spied a distant watermill
All ruined and distressed.
The ruins bade me tarry there
But I had far to go:
The waters ran without a care
As they had, years ago.

Sensation (Attraction)

The light defines the vision. Planetary influences are to be discounted.
Consider :: Action / Perception. The Influence = The Value.

Descent into the Underworld; Virgil (is to) Magnet :: Beatrice (is to) Anemometer.

Toads cross the roads
And bury the risk.
They squat on the answer
And color the task
Which, like a house,
Looks out on a pasture:
The pasture looks back
With its cow-confused doubts.

The mass of the rotating body is directly proportional to the ambient metaphor employed to describe it.

Cessation (Contraction) || (Confession) Reaction

Adversity, Weariness

Sorry I didn’t write; you know how it is, the day just gets away from you. I had to work very hard, very long, very late on Wednesday night. then I stopped off for a quick drink and everyone was dozing off so I went home. Overslept my usual wake-up time but was still at a deficit, full of confused thoughts and a scampering headache that hid behind the furniture of my mind when I tried to catch it. It was warm and clear, very picturesque, with the snow still in patches on the ground. A sentimental Christmas picture.

I went down and opened up the church and made coffee for myself, the pastor, and his wife; and then we celebrated a quiet Christmas day service with about sixty others. Locked up, went home, and ended up sleeping some more.

I woke up still weary, groggier and still chasing that headache. Pulled myself together for Christmas dinner. I got to my friends’ house just as the other guests arrived. They were dressed up; I was in jeans and a sweatshirt. The home was beautiful and the dinner was lovely and the conversation was interesting, irritating, amusing and bizarre (sequentially, not simultaneously), and before I knew it it was getting dark. The teenage son played with his Wii which is really a more wholesome activity than one would think. I left a little after six, after a lovely dessert.

Stopped off at another friend’s house for a minute and ended up staying for hours, through another Christmas dinner and dessert. Grandma had been discharged from rehab and she and her care-giver were there. Daughter was browsing the internet for a puppy for her brother to adopt. My friend dozed in the chair. It got to be after ten and I went home. Straight to bed.

That’s all for now. It’s another day, I’m still tired and groggy but it seems like the headache is gone.

Decay

Look at the pretty snow! Look, look, look. David has a job. He moves the snow. Move, move, move. Sometimes the rain falls on top of the snow. When it gets cold, it all turns to ice. David hates the ice. He wants it to go away. Today is Christmas Eve, and when it got cold, the rain turned to ice. It turned to ice on top of the snow. It turned to ice on the sidewalk. It turned to ice in the street. David was not happy. David has other things to do today besides fuck around with ice. Fuck, fuck, fuck. If it gets warmer, then the ice will start to go away, and David can deal with all his other Christmas Eve jobs. If it doesn’t go away, then David will just want to die. Die, die, die. And be buried. Decay, decay, decay.

The Army

The Army comes out only at night; they’re always there, in hiding, but as the greater light leaves the sky, and darkness descends, it emerges. They come out one by one, at first, and then, by the dozens, hundreds and multitudes. The cavalry outermost, and then the infantry further in, making a majestic circle around their captain. they sing a silent song of peace and of all the armies ever known this one alone has waged no war. The heavenly host, the array of the stars, dancing a stately quadrille, by the night and by the year, ceaselessly, until the earth itself ceases to be. And they sing: Glory.

Conflict

Markowitz famously observes that “[e]very Social Conflict is the arena for three mutually antagonistic forces: the Establishment, the opposition which seeks to overthrow the existing Order and replace it with one of its own, and the tendency towards increased Social Entropy which all Social Conflict engenders….”; and it is certainly true that these three forces exist on both an individual level and on the level of the vast historical movement. (In fact these forces are at continual work within individuals, and on smaller scales as well, but the point is tangential.) Conflict, it should be added, is not a continual state in human affairs, though it is virtually so on the larger social scale; in communities, nation-states, and on the world stage. Now, the Establishment, so called, and its opposition are alike in that they are each trying to force a particular condition or set of conditions in the future to occur, and they are both ineffectual and impotent because Social Entropy assures that neither future will fully come to pass. Let us take an example.

The Roman Empire was a Hegemonic Establishment almost without parallel, and it exercised the full extent of its will toward the indefinite extension of the Empire through time and space, and the suppression of opposition forces; but it was unable to suppress Chaos, which is not a force and is the opposition of the Oopposition as well as the Establishment. One Opposition movement, that of the Jewish nationalists under the rule of Rome, sought to roll back the Empire in their tradition territories and restore their defunct kingdom. These mutually antagonistic forces collided and were in open and bloody conflict for decades; and in the short term, the Romans appeared to have defeated the Jewish nationalists, who were in fact obliterated and cast to the seven winds. But, in the longer term, through a series of unforeseeable events, set in motion by some decidedly minor individuals, a splinter of the Jewish nationalist movement became a tiny cult which soon achieved widespread popularity throughout the Roman Empire. And this movement, unpredictably transformed but still strongly Jewish in character, in turn transformed the Empire and became its imperial religion. In effect, Rome turned into its opposition, and then vanquished itself.

Integrity (The Unexpected)

1. Hours of snow, sleet, rain, slush, mush, slish; and a tiny wisp of blue sky in the midst of the clouds.
2. A low intermittent rumble that no one hears but me.
3. Will I be in tomorrow and Tuesday? Don’t forget your shoes — and the cupcakes.
4. The geese are following the roads, believing them to be rivers. They fly almost due west.
5. When did you stop believing in Santa Claus?
7. I have resolved to listen to punk rock the rest of the holiday season.
8. The Freemasons invented ice cream as part of a secret, and successful, plot to overthrow Napoleon.
9. Somebody I know comes into the laundromat. We say nothing after hello.
11. The tires are resting on a little bit of gravel tonight. Maybe I’ll get out in the morning after all.
12. Dick Tracy was a real person. He was on the moon before Neil Armstrong.
13. There are enough books in the world now.

The Long Enduring

The years get to be a carpet worn threadbare from the constant tread over the same section. Pay no attention; that’s just the darkness and the cold and the boredom and the months of the same looming ahead. Summer nights are just as dark as winter ones. The oft-trod path can be varied, and, even if not, the carpet, worn through, reveals mysteries beneath. There is no exact repetition. The long enduring is rewarded by an eventual arrival. It may even be an arrival at the place you’ve always been.

Still: A little warmer, please? A little more light?

A Well

It’s all for show, of course, like so much else in this town. It’s a four foot high cylinder, with a wooden cover and a wrought-iron handle over the top. I’ve never seen inside; I presume it’s dark down there and, anyway, the bucket has long since fallen apart and been thrown away. No rope, no bucket; no water.

At some point, though, the well came first and the town followed. You need the source, you need the first thing. then all the other things follow. That’s the lesson for today (sorry, yes, there is a lesson; just remember that I’m mostly talking to myself here and you’re just eavesdropping — it’s all right to be a scold and a condescending ass when you’re condescending to yourself); as I say, that’s the lesson: find the source, the irreplaceable, immovable; and build around that.

Modesty

Lovers

There must have been a love story, but it doesn’t fit in with the narrative. Joseph and Mary come off as serene and obedient, and not at all passionate. But they were betrothed before they knew they were chosen; and one presumed that Joseph wanted to marry Mary for human reasons, not divine ones. At any rate I’d like him better if that were true; that he loved her and courted her and flirted with her and spoke to her parents and gazed into her eyes and did all of those things that lovers do. Or most of them, anyway; we are assured that they didn’t do at least one of those things.

The story of Jason and Medea, though, fairly drips with passion. According to the way the story is generally told, she is so carried away that she is almost continually presenting him with heartfelt bouquets of bodies and body parts. She does his homework for him, helps him through finals, again with the corpses; he takes her home to meet the folks and keeps her until he finds someone better for his career. She sends him one final bloody valentine, and the bastard had it coming. Of course, a lot of innocent parties are dismembered, immolated and poisoned along the way. But then you can’t make an omelet without spilling some milk.

I guess the love sory of Joseph and Mary is a “good” story; the part we hear is full of moderation and obligations met and reasonable behavior. Everything done decently and in order, as they say. a love story with the love left out. And the story of Jason and Medea is horrible, but a good story; an admonition for those of us who occasionally let our passions run away with us, in a less dramatic way. But I go back to the beginnings of each story. Joseph met Mary; Jason met Medea, and something bound them together, a future was bound to happen. There was no telling what that would be.