right NOW, right?
“Remember then: there is only one time that is important—Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power.”
This quote is from Leo Tolstoy’s What Men Live By, and Other Tales, and it serves as a fitting prompt for us all to direct our attention to what is actually happening in our lives in this moment.
KEEP READING
Wednesday's Word: twenty-sixteen
What Do You Know?
1. All together, Americans eat about ____________ Big Macs every year.
2. Since 720 B.C.E., when the first recorded eclipse was observed, Earth’s rotation has gotten about ____________ slower.
3. When you’re in a deep sleep, your neurons fire one to four times per second—compared to ____________ times per second when you’re concentrating on a memory.
What Do You Know?
4. ____________ have always been canvases for political commentary and projection, regardless if their manufacturers want them to be.
Wednesday Word: twenty-sixteen (so friggin' glad to see you go)Answers: 550 million, six hours, 30 to 90, Sneakers
The silence is so loud
No matter what I tell you
You still don’t want to see
Would you rather I lie to you
Than change what you believe
What a funny way to listen
With your head against a cloud
You refuse to answer me
The silence is so loud
© 2004 I published this in Sleeps with Knives www.bluehandbooks.org
 |
| I took this photo in Puerto Rico years back |
Cynthia Jobin, rest in peace
NORTH, EARLY DECEMBER
Let me down easy
the way hints of winter
fall exquisitely today
scattering icy lacy flowers
from a cloud bouquet
flutter, waver just a bit
unhurried and unworried
to get on with it.
A deeper cold will come
but stay its harder hand
let play a little longer
the november grey indefinites
let me down easy.
The longest night is still ahead
weighs heavy in the apprehension
threatening dismay
let me go haltingly into its
frozen moonlit desolation
tempered by the touch of
something of its opposite
knowing I am anyway
to be let down, I pray
let me down easy.
where do you begin...
‘Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one?’
— Lee Maracle, Ravensong.
‘The teacher can try to rearrange desires noncoercively… through an attempt to develop in the student a habit of literary reading, even just ‘reading,’ suspending oneself into the text of the other – for which the first condition and effect is a suspension of the conviction that I am necessarily better, I am necessarily the end product for which history happened.’
— Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Righting Wrongs.’
Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems
Fernando Pessoa, the most famous Portuguese poet, claimed to do nothing but “pretend and posture.” We are told in the Introduction that three of Pessoa’s primary characters are distinguished by how they “feel:” one just “feels;” another adjusts his feelings to reality; a third modifies his feelings "according to classical measures and rules." He created and abandoned styles, even being credited with a new type of symbolism called “Paulismo.” Pessoa gave each of his alternate egos physical descriptions, mannerisms and had them interact, converse, and write to each other, like a literary doll house. So in effect, his poems were written by “different people;" thus the “and company” of the book’s title.
So let’s see some snippets of his (their?) stuff:
To be a poet is not my ambition,
It’s my way of being alone
But Spring isn’t even a thing:
It’s a manner of speaking.
It is night. It’s very dark. In a house far away
A light is shining in the window.
I see it and feel human from head to toe.
The Universe is not an idea of mine;
My idea of the Universe is an idea of mine.
Night doesn’t fall before my eyes;
My idea of night falls before my eyes.
Where there are roses we plant doubt.
Most of the meaning we glean is our own,
And forever not knowing, we ponder.
Believe me, there’s no metaphysics on earth like chocolates,
And all religions put together teach no more than the candy shop.
I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist.
I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made me,
Or half of this gap, since there’s also life…
And as for the mother who rocks a dead child in her arms---
We all rock a dead child in our arms.
I’m being watched, but where from?
Which things that can’t see are looking at me?
Who’s in everything, peering?
From the mountain comes a song
Saying that however much
The soul may come to have,
It will always be unhappy.
Goodreads review by Jim Fonseca
So let’s see some snippets of his (their?) stuff:
To be a poet is not my ambition,
It’s my way of being alone
But Spring isn’t even a thing:
It’s a manner of speaking.
It is night. It’s very dark. In a house far away
A light is shining in the window.
I see it and feel human from head to toe.
The Universe is not an idea of mine;
My idea of the Universe is an idea of mine.
Night doesn’t fall before my eyes;
My idea of night falls before my eyes.
Where there are roses we plant doubt.
Most of the meaning we glean is our own,
And forever not knowing, we ponder.
Believe me, there’s no metaphysics on earth like chocolates,
And all religions put together teach no more than the candy shop.
I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist.
I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made me,
Or half of this gap, since there’s also life…
And as for the mother who rocks a dead child in her arms---
We all rock a dead child in our arms.
I’m being watched, but where from?
Which things that can’t see are looking at me?
Who’s in everything, peering?
From the mountain comes a song
Saying that however much
The soul may come to have,
It will always be unhappy.
Goodreads review by Jim Fonseca
we're watching
Syfy Channel has this: 12 Disasters of Christmas... here
and maybe this:
The X-Files: "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas"
Six seasons into its run, The X-Files still had plenty of tricks up its sleeve, including this last of a few holiday episodes, which was highly-promoted by Fox at the time it aired. Lily Tomlin and Ed Asner guest starred as two ghosts in a haunted house being investigated by Mulder and Scully. The ghosts were in love and took part in a murder-suicide pact so they would never have to be apart, and as Mulder learned, they haunted a house every Christmas Eve. However, their intentions are not as good as they might sound. This was definitely one of the more memorable one-off X-Files episodes, with tremendous performances by Asner and Tomlin.
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