Friday, August 8, 2014

You'll Need a Spieliologist's Desire for Rebirth and a Miner's Paranoia of Gases





Earlier this week when I changed the blog's header for a couple of days because I wanted to reintroduce Fleabus to the blog's look I said, Fleabus blogheader returns for at least a few days. This does not mean I am contemplating changing the template. It does mean it occurs to me that the template can be changed. Shazam! Serendipity! Last night Richard tweeted that the blog wouldn't load and Dan chipped in it wouldn't load for him either, and when I tweeted out the question were others experiencing the same I got a few emails back yes. I'm a tech-dope, but it seems to that in the past there are three main reasons the blog loads slowly: (1) my motherfucking free blogging platform, (2) all the youtubes, which are not going away but which I try to help by limiting posts on the front page, (3) blogs and sites on the blogroll which used to provide feeds but have blegicided recently, which I remove when I discover them (and I will work - as promised recently but have yet to do - over the weekend), (4) the active static background which, though it is my beloved noxzema-bottle blue, I can live without. Early reports are that the blog is loading faster now I've removed the static background and replaced it with an, um, static background.














HOW TO LOVE BATS

Judith Beveridge

Begin in a cave.
Listen to the floor boil with rodents, insects.
Weep for the pups that have fallen. Later,
you’ll fly the narrow passages of those bones,
                                                       but for now —
open your mouth, out will fly names
like Pipistrelle, Desmodus, Tadarida. Then,
listen for a frequency
lower than the seep of water, higher
than an ice planet hibernating
beyond a glacier of Time.
Visit op shops. Hide in their closets.
Breathe in the scales and dust
of clothes left hanging. To the underwear
and to the crumbled black silks — well,
give them your imagination
and plenty of line, also a night of gentle wind.
By now your fingers should have
touched petals open. You should have been dreaming
each night of anthers and of giving
to their furred beauty
your nectar-loving tongue. But also,
your tongue should have been practising the cold
of a slippery, frog-filled pond.
Go down on your elbows and knees.
You’ll need a spieliologist’s desire for rebirth
and a miner’s paranoia of gases —
but try to find within yourself
the scent of a bat-loving flower.
Read books on pogroms. Never trust an owl.
Its face is the biography of propaganda.
Never trust a hawk. See its solutions
in the fur and bones of regurgitated pellets.
And have you considered the smoke
yet from a moving train? You can start
half an hour before sunset,
but make sure the journey is long, uninterrupted
and that you never discover
the faces of those Trans-Siberian exiles.
Spend time in the folds of curtains.
Seek out boarding-school cloakrooms.
Practise the gymnastics of web umbrellas.
                                             Are you
floating yet, thought-light,
without a keel on your breastbone?
Then, meditate on your bones as piccolos,
on mastering the thermals
beyond the tremolo; reverberations
beyond the lexical.
                                           Become adept
at describing the spectacles of the echo —
but don’t watch dark clouds
passing across the moon. This may lead you
to fetishes and cults that worship false gods
by lapping up bowls of blood from a tomb.
Practise echo-locating aerodromes,
stamens. Send out rippling octaves
into the fossils of dank caves —
then edit these soundtracks
with a metronome of dripping rocks, heartbeats
and with a continuous, high-scaled wondering
about the evolution of your own mind.
But look, I must tell you — these instructions
are no manual. Months of practice
may still only win you appreciation
of the acoustical moth,
hatred of the hawk and owl. You may need
to observe further the floating black host
through the hills.



2 comments:

  1. A quick check of the CPU meter shows that having a tab of BDR open no longer results in Firefox using a significant portion of it.
    ~

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  2. Thanks for putting Bats in my head as well! Problem is, if you eat bats—particularly the brains—what is colloquially known as 'bush meat', you can contract Ebola. So, bottom line: Bats in your head = Good!; bats in your stomach = Dangerous.

    That is all.

    Except for this: it could also be your server that's causing your YouTubes to load so slowly. That's probs a subset of (1) [i.e., the free platform issue].

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