Wednesday, May 4, 2011

As If Some Sorcery Had Shocked the Occupant's Hand Alive Again, Back to Compose a Document in Calligraphy So Dragonish That a Single Misstep Made It Necessary to Stop Right Then and There and Tear the Botched Draft Up

I bought a calligraphy pen yesterday afternoon and wrote this post's first draft to test writing with the calligraphy pen (I'd never used one before) on a piece of graph paper I'd already stained with watercolor. I wrote sentences about the routinizing (I wrote routinization - there's no back space with calligraphy pens, I discovered) of torture, how that is the greater sin to perpetually kayfabing rubes like me, not the clandestine torture we assumed was going on quietly, reluctantly but professionally while we were growing up. I was complaining, one president ago, the torture betrayal wasn't the torture but the get-the-fuck-used-to-it revelations of torture.

America tortured, tortures, will torture, America rode genocide and slavery and imperialism to empire and will use any means necessary to perpetuate that empire, including but not limited to torture and genocide, and the state of my complicity is this: I wrote the first draft of this post about my lost kayfabe innocence with a calligraphy pen I bought yesterday afternoon to amuse myself.




The manic good mood is gone, but I need to push the what the fuck before I lose that too. Also, did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team? It's true! and they have a home game tonight versus a neon lime green team, so tune in tomorrow when I drive away more readers with a game recap. Also, since Fleabus photos are back, especially greatest hits, a reminder once again that all Fleabus photos are by Planet, at least for now, I'll reevaluate come the Fall, but I've a massive archive. Also, for those of you who are back for the first time in a week or so, here, for the last time, is a link to what's up with the blue. (Also, in Thai if needed.)







UPDATE!

RIP, Trelane:








  • One of my goals in life is to be the cranky old neighborhood coot with more cats than can be counted and creepy garden statuary, so please send your cat photos and I'll post them. They're not just welcome here, they're solicited.
  • Wonderful librarians. I am not a librarian, though I work in a library.
  • Rapid transit?
  • One mile from my house.
  • Gaithersburg's astronomic history!
  • MOCO trees!


UPDATE!

Seat Six has bagged on tonight's game v Neon Lime Green @ RFK @ 730, so I have an extra ticket! Hamster has until 2PM to claim it and has been so notified by email, but if he either doesn't respond and/or can't go, you have until 3PM to put in your claim. I will be offline from 3PM until I get home after the game, so if you want me to pdf the ticket and email it to you, you must get your email to me by 3PM.








THE NIGHT SHIP

Timothy Donnelly

Roll back the stone from the sepulchre's mouth!
I sense disturbance deep within, as if some sorcery

had shocked the occupant's hand alive again, back
to compose a document in calligraphy so dragonish

that a single misstep made it necessary to stop
right then and there and tear the botched draft up,

begin again and stop, tear up again and scatter
a squall of paper lozenges atop the architecture

that the mind designs around it, assembling a city
somewhat resembling the seaport of your birth,

that blinking arrangement of towers and signage
you now wander underneath, drawn forward by the spell

of the sea's one scent, by the bell of the night ship
that cleaves through the mist on its path to the pier.

Surrender to that vision and the labor apprehensible
as you take to the streets from the refuge of a chair

so emphatically comfortable even Lazarus himself
would have chosen to remain unrisen from its velvet,

baffling the messiah, His many onlookers muttering
awkwardly to themselves, downcast till a sudden

dust devil spirals in from the dunes—a perfect excuse 
to duck back indoors. (The sand spangles their eyes,

the little airborne stones impinge upon such faces
as only Sorrow's pencil would ever dare to sketch,

and even then, it wouldn't be a cakewalk, you realize.
A dust devil at sea would be called a waterspout.)

You fear that you have been demanded into being
only to be dropped on the wintry streets of this 

imagination rashly, left easy prey for the dockside
phantoms, unwatched and unawaited, and I know 

what you mean, almost exactly. This cardboard city
collapses around us; another beautiful document

disassembles into anguish—a cymbal-clap—and we can't
prevent it. At one the wind rises, and the night ship

trembles, drowsing back into its silver cloud. At two it embarks
upon a fiercer derangement. We are in this together.

And we will find protection only on the night ship.

6 comments:

  1. From Pammalammadingdong to Harper's, as the saying goes.

    P.S. I remain inclined to think, optimistically, that Obama has made the right move.

    Jonathan Stevenson is more optimistic than I am.
    ~

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  2. Excerpt from an essay by Daniel Patrick Welch:

    . . . And isn’t it way past time for Americans to choke on our own bloated rhetoric, the constant, nauseating peristalsis of Orwellian bullshit that flows from the agents of the Lone Superpower war machine? In one theater after another, as Americans graze blissfully unaware on our diet of hamburgers, housewives, and media hash, the empire is sowing the seeds of its own destruction and hastening its own demise.

    . . . Ever the dutiful technocrat, The Obomber epitomizes the infinitely more dangerous potential of the yes man over that of the ideologue.
    Welcome to the post racial society, crow the enthusiasts of a rigged and money-drenched electoral system that feigns democracy while undermining it at every possible turn. Americans aren’t interested in genuine democracy, don’t experience it at all in virtually any aspect of our daily lives, and wouldn’t recognize it if it jumped up and bit us in our collective transfat ass.

    Besides, civil rights are for silly whiners who still think "democracy" is about being able to protest in the streets. Obviously they missed the memo: It's about being able to choose your favorite brand of sneakers or your choice of which housewives to obsess over. Duh! Way to go: “we” elected a black guy! Big deal—Caligula elected a horse.

    . . . Orwell and Kafka lost together in the miserable plot(s) of Inception could not have constructed such a horrific nightmare. There is no dystopia yet written that can rival the brave new world in which we are living today. The worst part is that, while drones patrol the skies, from Libya to the Mexican border to the streets of our inner cities where the two million plus inhabitants of our Prison Planet grow—the largest in the world, another American triumph—in the midst of this horror, debate rages on about how to tweak a broken system, about how best to enrich the already-haves, about the values of recycling and gluten-free beer. John Connor is not coming back, folks. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.


    http://mwcnews.net/focus/politics/10198-hasta-la-vista-baby.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jeez, what's wrong with you internetizens, Osama was so Monday.

    Yay, cats! I wonder if I have any non-grainy shots of the gang.

    Re: librarians/libraries. The only serial porn freak we've had since they added a log-in screen a few years back was an emeritus prof. Heh.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Speaking of Liberace, Michael Douglas, of all people, has been tapped to star in a new movie about him.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Aw, poor Trelane. The picture at the top of the obit has him looking, oddly, hot. Didn't think I'd ever say that about Koloth of all people.

    Thanks for the linx!

    By the way, why didn't you ever tell me how awesome John Cale is? I mean, whole-career awesome.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I thought I did, but I'm not perfect. Play that loud please.

    Yes, he's one of my desert island five - I've got dozens of them, but he's certainly in the top fifteen.

    ReplyDelete