The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

I will name my son Benjamin, I think — nevermind the allitereration — where do names come from? Mommy and Daddy sitting in a room, inventing my identity? The strangeness of reality — one thousand books will only make you good at spinning stories — spin a thousand stories, but once, long ago, I was a story spun by others and now I spin, and the world goes on, inventing each new day and while there is background, there is also field, and the field dances with the inner secret fire, the true things, the secret names.

The peace-loving rainbow tribe had gathered for thirty years in relative peace, in contravention of Babylon — but as the old died, and young wolves came to take their place, the nights got darker, and bad things were whispered of in the woods —

Until the knights of Babylon swooped in on the tribe, killing and hurting.

Then the secret plan came, and the tribe disappeared from the world, the location of the gatherings only spread by secret word of mouth.

“Long you live and high you fly
And smiles you’ll give and tears you’ll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be.”

Re: Henderson and the Rain King, Bellow’s Masterstroke

After Henderson moved the great stone goddess of storms, King Dahfu took him into the debths to meet the dark secret lioness, not Dahfu’s father. As Henderson stood in the room, the symbol was real for him and real for me; this was not a symbolic lion, but a real lion, and the real lion is death, the all destroying world, that pads past you in the room.

I know that it is freezing, but I think we have to walk
I keep waving at the taxis, they keep turning their lights off
But Julie knows a party at some actor’s West side loft
Supplies are endless in the evening by the morning they’ll be gone

december in the city … walking down the long avenue … black cars driving by
red lights pull away … your hair is thin but beautiful …
the buzzing in my nose … behind my eyes …
exciting irritation … quick glances, back, forth …
limbs are stretched and tired … hidden behind the buzz of several amphetamines.

When everything is lonely I can be my own best friend
I’ll get a coffee and the paper, have my own conversations
with the sidewalk and the pigeons and my window reflection
The mask I polish in the evening by the morning looks like shit

Don’t I know it — the sweet and easy lonely breakfast — newspaper and a television in a small apartment — it isn’t necessarily happiness, but it’s close — alone with your self, your thoughts, and your world — pure in the morning — can I string words together and make a sentence? can I read these words and hang them like tinsel on my mind? Who is Northrop Frye?

And I know you have a heavy heart, I can feel it when we kiss
So many men stronger than me have thrown their backs out trying to lift it
But me I’m not a gamble, you can count on me to split
The love I sell you in the evening by the morning won’t exist

You’re looking skinny like a model with your eyes all painted black
Just keep going to the bathroom, always say you’ll be right back
Well, it takes one to know one, kid, I think you’ve got it bad
But what’s so easy in the evening by the morning’s such a drag

I got a flask inside my pocket, we can share it on the train
And if you promise to stay conscious I will try and do the same
We might die from medication, but we sure killed all the pain
But what was normal in the evening by the morning seems insane

And I’m not sure what the trouble was that started all of this
The reasons all have run away, but the feeling never did
It’s not something I would recommend, but it is one way to live
Cause what is simple in the moonlight by the morning never is

It was so simple in the moonlight now it’s so complicated
It was so simple in the moonlight, so simple in the moonlight
So simple in the moonlight…

Once upon a time, across the several forests and in the greensome valleys, Polychrome and Button lived together in a small farm house on the shores of a wide calm lake. In the morning, Polychrome would go out into her front yard and smell the mild morning breeze wafting in off the lake, and watch splashes of sunlight dance gold across the water.

While Button still sleeps, snoring softly, the long tip of his pointed sleepcap blowing up and then falling down with every breath, Polychrome walks the narrow rows of kukua plants she planted in her garden last March, bending down to split the brown fruit and slipping the wet shiny beans into her left pocket. Then, before Button wakes, she slips into the house and makes Button a cup of coffee, waking him up by waving it beneath his nose.

Button then sprang out of bed, and crawled throug the canvass flap that goes straight into the barn, where, rummaging under Old Mother Chicken, he grabbed two eggs and brought them back, to the little fire that burns in one corner. After throwing them down on the iron skillet, he watched them bubble for two minutes, then scooped them up with his wooden spoon and served them to Polychrome on a chipped china plate.

Should the whole frame of Nature round him break,
In ruin and confusion hurled,
He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack,
and stand secure amidst a falling world

— Horace, Odes 3.3 (by way of Addison)

We don’t know what it means yet, but we soon will. Applications for the Corpus Lex?

Link

So says the proud deontologist, exalting the means above the ends, arguing that duty is all, that the person who matters most is the one wearing the eyes and that person should never pull the trigger —

or perhaps it speaks to universal imperatives — absolute rules — and better that there should be one less murderer than one less murdered — the world is a broken, terrible, cruel, and horrible place, and We, the Living, the Most Horrible, the Long Legged Sons of Murder, the Survivors who lived on, munching on the bones of others —

How long ago was it that the Germans shoved my people into trains, people like my mother, brother, and lover, so close that they were standing on top of each, endless torture of endless days, darkness and night, on iron rails to dark gates and clouds mixed with the ash of my people. That is real. That happened. Seventy years ago. Within the memory of those still living. Not once. Not for a moment. For years — to six million.

And that is just my own personal real nature — me and my lover, separated at the camps, never to see her again — watching my father fall beneath their whips as he grows weak — the pain of waking — These are True Nightmares. True Nightmares. These things happened. They were done. Right across the water.

Let justice be done though the heavens fall. After the war, mankind lost its justification for existence. We were tested and found wanting. We should be punished collectively for what was done. All of us — Jew and Gentile, German and American, Arab. It happened, and it was allowed to happen. There is something in the human spirit that permitted it to happen. Something in the human spirit that walks up to two boys on the street, one in a wheelchair, and opens up and pulls the trigger. The single murder on the streets of Philadelphia is as evil as the Auschwitz gas chamber.

We are fragile weak-willed bags of pus and fluid. Easily broken. Worth little. And yet the wailing and the weeping and the gnashing of teeth when a baby is thrown against the wall and his brains leak out. Somehow, we seem to care.

n. The inevitable decay of institutions in late-stage capitalist societies.

See Stephen Labaton and Steven R. Weisman, U.S. Considers Takeover Of Two Mortgage Giants, New York Times, July 11, 2008, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/business/11fannie.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin