"Praise be"

And He decreed Man to be holy and saw his work be done. He, who may be named or unnamed, praised or defiled, walked this land with bootstraps trailing, shedding blessings like soaked leaves after a shower and notes of blue cheese staining his nostrils and His mouth dried of wizened lips. His mind, like a bee's comb, rattled with winged pits that bled honey, was spread upon the land a tough woollen thread, embroidered with confusion grown bald and too few ladyfingers, spread and tugged into the four corners, tucked into the quiet limits of the mattress, and accepted by the people. For it is He, they say, Who colours the chalk white and He who begs the rivers to flow for His people, and He Who caresses your cried out reddened throat with golden honey lozenges; and He Who listens.

To his lost lover
     by Simon Armitage

Now they are no longer
any trouble to each other

he can turn things over, get down to that list
of things that never happened, all of the lost

unfinishable business.
For instance… for instance,

how he never clipped and kept her hair, or drew a hairbrush
through that style of hers, and never knew how not to blush

at the fall of her name in close company.
How they never slept like buried cutlery –

two spoons or forks cupped perfectly together,
or made the most of some heavy weather –

walked out into hard rain under sheet lightning,
or did the gears while the other was driving.

How he never raised his fingertips
to stop the segments of her lips

from breaking the news,
or tasted the fruit

or picked for himself the pear of her heart,
or lifted her hand to where his own heart

was a small, dark, terrified bird
in her grip. Where it hurt.

Or said the right thing,
or put it in writing.

And never fled the black mile back to his house
before midnight, or coaxed another button of her blouse,

then another,
or knew her

favourite colour,
her taste, her flavour,

and never ran a bath or held a towel for her,
or soft-soaped her, or whipped her hair

into an ice-cream cornet or a beehive
of lather, or acted out of turn, or misbehaved

when he might have, or worked a comb
where no comb had been, or walked back home

through a black mile hugging a punctured heart,
where it hurt, where it hurt, or helped her hand

to his butterfly heart
in its two blue halves.

And never almost cried,
and never once described

an attack of the heart,
or under a silk shirt

nursed in his hand her breast,
her left, like a tear of flesh

wept by the heart,
where it hurts,

or brushed with his thumb the nut of her nipple,
or drank intoxicating liquors from her navel.

Or christened the Pole Star in her name,
or shielded the mask of her face like a flame,

a pilot light,
or stayed the night,

or steered her back to that house of his,
or said “Don’t ask me how it is

I like you.
I just might do.”

How he never figured out a fireproof plan,
or unravelled her hand, as if her hand

were a solid ball
of silver foil

and discovered a lifeline hiding inside it,
and measured the trace of his own alongside it.

But said some things and never meant them –
sweet nothings anybody could have mentioned.

And left unsaid some things he should have spoken,
about the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often.

"The Pillow"

The pillow said:
at the end of the long day
only I know
the confident man’s confusion,
the nun’s desire,
the slight quiver in the tyrant’s eyelash,
the preacher’s obscenity,
the soul’s longing
for a warm body where flying sparks
become a glowing coal.
Only I know
the grandeur of unnoticed little things;
only I know the loser’s dignity,
the winner’s loneliness
and the stupid coldness one feels
when a wish has been granted.


by Mourid Barghouti

translation Radwa Ashour
from Midnight and Other Poems
Publisher: Arc Publications, Todmorden, Lancashire, 2009


When I read this for the first time, I thought "I don't want to be dignified, for dignity only shows itself in defeat. It is a remedy for failure."

"Dactylitis"

Periosteal reaction

to adjacent tendonitis

is occasionally evident

radiographically.

Pollini on music

"In a way art is a little like the dreams of a society. They seem to contribute little, but sleeping and dreaming are vitally important in that a human couldn't live without them, in the same way a society cannot live without art."

From his interview with the Guardian, "Maurizio Pollini: a life in music"

Hacker on Philosophy

James Garvey discusses Peter Hacker (wiki) and Wittgenstein in "Hacker's Challenge" in The Philosopher's Magazine. Here is a quote from that article by Hacker:

“Philosophy does not contribute to our knowledge of the world we live in after the manner of any of the natural sciences. You can ask any scientist to show you the achievements of science over the past millennium, and they have much to show: libraries full of well-established facts and well-confirmed theories. If you ask a philosopher to produce a handbook of well-established and unchallengeable philosophical truths, there’s nothing to show. I think that is because philosophy is not a quest for knowledge about the world, but rather a quest for understanding the conceptual scheme in terms of which we conceive of the knowledge we achieve about the world. One of the rewards of doing philosophy is a clearer understanding of the way we think about ourselves and about the world we live in, not fresh facts about reality.”

Emerson

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.

"Assistance"

In a cloud of exhaustion the train pulls into the station. The doors slide to the side meeting the crowded platform full of mothers and girlfriends and children jostling for a clear vantage of their loved ones spilling from the door one by one like chickens from a narrow coop. The sun, still low in the sky, peeks through the slots in the roof. Rigid from the long night ride in artificial illumination, you raise a hand to block the morning sun, then realize the futility of the act and lower your hand. You stare at the sun and the sun stares back.

The night ride wasn't easy, a passage common enough, but this time your quota for hardship is full. You're ready to be done. Now, once you're finally stationary you drop from the train, breathing a sigh, but your deliverance is drowned by the push of passengers, and you're reminded of the unbearable absence of breathable air.

Coming out of the crowd, there's a man in a gray wool suit holding a small piece of paper with your name on it. He raises his hand in greeting and leans forward to catch your eye.

"I'm glad you're here," you manage to say, reaching the man.
He nods. "Thank you for the payment. Now that everything is in order are you sure you'd like to continue?"

The man motions toward the parking lot. "How was the train ride? Did you get any sleep?" "The lights in the carriage were blinding," you say. "I couldn't see the stars for my reflection."

His car is waiting. Leather seats, water bottles, boxes of white tissue. A sweat of rain pervades the interior like a mountain forest after a downpour.

We arrive in front of a smart-looking apartment building. You get out, and as you cross the narrow street the uneven lay of cobblestones buffet the soles of your feet. The stones look recently washed in strips, shiny and clean where the cars run. Even the gutters are clean. The air here is light and crisp as if never having been inhaled. The sky is blue and full, the sun shining sideways as if saying, "Behold, the world."

The man opens the door of the building and enters, beckoning in. You mount the staircase until the door with DIGNITAS written on a plaque. The man shows you in and closes the door.

"Here it is," says the man. The apartment is sparsely decorated with a large window opening onto the city. The lake, shimmering in the morning light, is visible to the right. "Are you sure you'd like to continue?" the man asks.

The man motions to the plush seat by the window. You lower yourself gently into it and breath out until your interior and exterior reach equilibrium, an equilibrium that sinks you lower and lower into the plush. The train ride tired you. A lifetime of renewal and fatigue pulls on your body.

The man walks out of the room returning immediately with a glass of water. Out of a cabinet he removes a small vial and empties the vial into the glass watching the two colorless liquids mix, twisting and contorting around each other in a lewd dance. He places the glass on the side table next to the window.
"The doctor's forms are all in order. Are you sure you'd like to continue?"

Your fingers wrap around the glass, cold with its colorless fluid, and outside the sun shines on the still lake, and trolleys snake proudly up and down the street like parents with their children in tow. A couple below, a boy and a girl, walk hand in hand. Their gait is so youthful in its moxie that the street scene becomes hopelessly infused with a seductive nectar of vitality, one that lures the innocent into a room with no exit and clouds the view with a mist of impossible dreams. The couple, they must be on their way to the lake to drink in the new day. The boy stops, hand around the girl's waist, and pulls the girl close. He whispers in her ear, and they dive together into an endless embrace.

Back in your plush seat you see the man in gray and he looks at you sitting in a cloud of dust and the colorless liquid in your hand.

You put the glass to your lips, close your eyes and let the poisonous drink chill the back of your throat. It coats your throat, then esophagus, then gut and you can feel your arms and legs not feeling your arms and legs. And the air in the apartment suddenly wanes thin and frigid lifting hanging dust particles that grow in prominence like countless waxing moons. And your mind stumbles back to the apartment, to the gray scratching wool of the man's suit, to the life you've just about finished, a burnt day-old-pizza-crust-of-a-life lying still after the delicious part is gone. Gone and you're ready to go, fantastic visions of color-wheels and city lights, the purple surge of passion in youth and its measured companion in aging brown, and the blurred majesty of sunflower fields, memories eddying, spilling like neglected spaghetti water boiling over in protest. Boiling dust in colorless liquid. Boiling leather seats and tissues. Trains stop and breathe. Sputter.

And as you lean your head to look over the city one last time, you are blinded by the glory of the morning sun, dead in the dusty plush seat by the window.

J.D. Salinger is dead

Hide not thy tears on this last day

Your sorrow has no shame;

To march no more midst lines of gray;

No longer play the game.

Four years have passed in joyful ways — Wouldst stay those old times dear?

Then cherish now these fleeting days,

The few while you are here.

By J.D. Salinger

NYTimes

The Arrow of Time

He [Sean Carroll] explains how, at a subatomic or quantum level, it is far from obvious why the arrow of time should point the way it does, for the laws of physics stipulate that particle interactions are reversible. In the quantum world, time might as well run backward as forward. Imagine a film clip of two billiard balls moving at a steady pace, colliding and bouncing off each other. How can you be sure that the film was not shown to you in reverse—that what you actually saw was time running backward? So Mr. Carroll persists: "Why then, in the observable universe, does time appear to run in one direction only? Why, for instance, when an egg is broken and scrambled into an omelette, if the quantum processes that allowed this to happen are reversible, why does the omelette never reassemble itself into an egg?"

- Alexander Waugh in the WSJ


It is exactly for the reason that billiard balls would not be moving at a steady pace, rather would be slowing down at each instant through resistance, that the arrow of time points the way it does. And this resistance, or reaction activation requirements in the language of interactions reversible or otherwise, would accumulate at each infinitesimal moment leading to a formidable requirement at the meta level manifested in unidirectional time, just as the billiard ball noticeably slows down. This may be more evident in the cracking of an egg as each quantum crack, falsely proposed to be reversible, has a very low activation requirement to be overcome in one direction, yet a much larger one in the opposite direction due to the reduction in entropy. Hence, the overall reaction is irreversible.