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

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

Somewhere, at the end of the journey, lies the undoor, the door that does not open. After long searching, down a deep and circuitous venture into the roots of the mountains, H/P comes to the sealed door, carved by ancient hands. Nothing can open the door — the door’s purpose is not to open. Still, coming to the door, H/P must pass through it. And willing it so, he does — and finds himself on the other side, in a new world that is identical to the old.

He walks out of the roots, up underneath the bright sun, and out into the New World. No one in it knows or believes there was ever anything other than this New World. But H/P knows — H/P knows that he has slipped between the worlds of if, and found himself in a new place, where anything is still possible. Where before there was fate, and the Door, now, there is freedom, and the wide open space of that which is not yet known.

He goes on, not to confront his destiny, but to create it.

After being thrown from the garden at midnight by two strong unseen hands, First Adam wakes to find himself shameful and covered, and looks over at Pretty Evey-baby, whose own figleaf wrapdress only serves to heighten his excitement; under an audience of starsouls shining ancient light, he rustles leaves and plows a furrow and plants two seeds; a gasp and a smile and then a premonition of mortality shakes through Kadmon like a windstorm.

Afterwards, sitting on a hard rock, glumly looking at his helpmate sleeping, thinking back to that applebrandy she’d made for him (had he asked her to do it, he couldn’t remember now, that didn’t sound like something he would do), that forbidden fruit from Etz HaDa’at, No-Longer Kadmon, Simply Madam I’m Adam now, looks out at the long dark cursed land, undone, unmade, no cities, no streets or roadsigns, and thinks of all the work him and his mewlings have yet to do.

He looks back eastward one last time-like, towards Edenville 001, the Old Happy Haunting Grounds, (walking in a dark leafy garden, always feeling like some great raincloud was glancing over his shoulder, whispering at him in capital letters); he can just make out the luminous fireglow that sits between the legs of two mountains framing the pass.

You can’t go backwards, A.K. muses, only frontwards, and he thinks of the reluctant dirt waiting his still soft hands. He thinks of a bed he’ll one day lie in. First time ever, he sits awake all night, first ever insomniac, looking at Eveybaby and crying without a reason.

Everyone seems to misread Plato, taking his Republic for fact when in fact it is fancy, a gedankenexperiment, and what does he build, the broad-shouldered one, after chasing Homer and the honeyless drones from the city?

What is justice, Broadback? Just doing what you do, babyface, do what you do, and don’t do what you don’t do, there ain’t nothing to it; let the trader trade, and the guardian guard, and the ruler rule, and all will be well.

But here are some others, dispensed with by So Crates:

Definition 1: Returning debts.

Giving everybody their just deserts, good to your friends, and ill to your enemy. Socrates disagrees, however, that the just man would do harm to their enemies.

There is more and more of this, but let’s go here to the problem of the Universal Immortal Soul:

saying that since evil doesn’t harm it, it necessarily lives forever; saying that since it is not of the body it doesn’t die; all that and all that is well and well enough alone, but I counter with my own metahpor, saying you talk about IDEAS, Plato, surely you do, well how ’bout this IDEA — you put water, which has no shape, in a glass, and the water now has a shape: the shape of the glass. Break the glass, and the water loses its shape. Now the shape of the water, that’s a thing of the water; it’s not a thing of the glass; Glass is one thing, water another, and you could write things on the glass, or paint it black, or even crack it without disrupting the shape of the water. Nevertheless, the glass is necessary for the shape of the water to exist. Without the glass, there is no shape.

The soul is the shape of the water, our bodies the glass, our minds, the shape of the glass. There ain’t no free lunch, sister, and your soul is not immortal.

A skater in his mid twenties, wearing a gray-tshirt and marooon shorts, hops the long steps of Love Park, picking up speed as he goes, and then spins around the corner out of view.

I sit on a bench and let my eyes drift back to the fountain, shooting up great gusts of water every other second which then crash down with a firm but blurry roar, ten thousand asynchronous crashes added together, solid but imprecise. The white spray hovers around the fountain’s base; the pool ripples with small waves.

In front of me, a girl stands on the edge of the fountain and hesitates, do it, I think, eat a peach, she looks at her friend, and then back at the water, the friend is having none of it, the friend walks off, the girl stays, slips her sandals off and sits. She is my age, I guess, in a gray and rainbow dress. She dangles her feet in the water for couple of minutes, then gets up and walks back over to her friend, redhead in a white skirt, less brave.

I take my tie off and roll up my sleeves. Twenty six years old, I think. More untrustworthy by the day.