- I keep my word and will not drive to work to scan the latest additions to poem in progress in big tablet (which I did not work on last night so not to tempt my vanity this morning)
- Here however is first of two two farts from last night, this one at the other place, I will not ask you to move to other place but other (paid) place does things my free fucking blog platform can't do both onblog at at twitter
- Here is the second of two which really requires a high tech scanner since the subject matter (besides *me*) are the five colors of ink in which it is written:
- I also need post so I can today in tablet the rest of this page (in cobalt blue ink) as well as bleed today through the next
- but yes, I obsess on ink and tablet since it's the one thing I can obsess that I can control (and/or can post here)
- UPDATE! Was a year ago today I heard that Tom Clark had died.
- So I finished Saturday in redorange tablet (I'm not supposed to deliberately write first and only one draft poems in redorange tablet, revolution, motherfuckers) out of order, Sunday will start on page above and next page before finishing below
- two pages away under last night
- Daily duh: Sanders and our sociopath overlords' bullhorns
- Also too: Sanders and Your Fucking Washington Post
- Sexism in the Academy
- On the road to recession
- The temptation of untethering
- Avedon's occasional links
- Maggie's weekly links
- Art thoughts
- Kate Bush forty years ago May
- { feuilleton }'s weekly links
- Brenda Shaughnessy's *Octopus Museum* my favorite new book of poems this year, go, *and* it's a beautiful object to hold in hands
- Magnificent Octopus is reading O'Hara
- Daily duh: America was built on slavery and genocide
THE IDEA OF OTHERS
Brenda Shaughnessy
An animal is scritching in the wall behind my bed. At first I thought
it was some kind of water crackling in a heating pipe but what kind of
water stops when you thump the wall? I don’t mean to be mean, I mean to
make it scurry off, to send it to scritch somewhere I can’t hear.
No, I’m not afraid—it is small, by the sound of its scritch. I’m not in Room 101, not worried about a gnarled whiskered rodent face chewing my eyelids in my sleep. I know these small animals, if it is an animal,
are generally afraid of big, intelligent me so far up the food chain, capable of terrible violence if frightened. I know they know they can never physically get me and are only after a crumb or a drop, like everyone really.
No, I’m trying to protect my peace of mind, my inner life, my pest-free dreams, from these unseen labors in a frenzy in the wall behind my bed. I was going to say it drives me mad and that is its fault, or was I going to say who am I to judge the urges and intensities of another species?
What I’ll say instead is that I am part of the universe, privy to sounds parallel but unreachable, and on some other level, that I know I am alive, factually, unloving and alone.
No, I’m not afraid—it is small, by the sound of its scritch. I’m not in Room 101, not worried about a gnarled whiskered rodent face chewing my eyelids in my sleep. I know these small animals, if it is an animal,
are generally afraid of big, intelligent me so far up the food chain, capable of terrible violence if frightened. I know they know they can never physically get me and are only after a crumb or a drop, like everyone really.
No, I’m trying to protect my peace of mind, my inner life, my pest-free dreams, from these unseen labors in a frenzy in the wall behind my bed. I was going to say it drives me mad and that is its fault, or was I going to say who am I to judge the urges and intensities of another species?
What I’ll say instead is that I am part of the universe, privy to sounds parallel but unreachable, and on some other level, that I know I am alive, factually, unloving and alone.
Brenda Shaughnessy: I am part of the universe
ReplyDeleteAnna Ijjas: REFLECTING on the question of what God was doing before creation, Saint Augustine is said to have quipped: “He was preparing hell for those who pry into mysteries.” Apparently the idea of hell doesn’t scare today’s scientists. As a matter of fact, many of us are trying to understand how our universe came to be.
You might think that the universe started with a big bang. Ten years ago, that is what I thought too. But then I came to realise that the issue is far from settled. Pursuing this question prompted me to change the tack of my career and become a cosmologist, even though I had just completed a PhD in the philosophy of quantum physics. What I have discovered since then supports a radically new response to the question that irked Augustine – what came before the beginning? The answer, thrillingly, may be that there never was a big bang, but instead a universe with no beginning or end, repeatedly bouncing from an epoch of contraction to expansion, and back again.
In the 1920s, the Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann and the Belgian priest and astronomer George Lemaître independently proposed that the universe was expanding. Extrapolating backwards in time, Lemaître reasoned that it ought to have started off as a small “primeval atom”. When Edwin Hubble provided compelling empirical evidence in favour of cosmic expansion based on his observation of the motions of distant galaxies, the case was settled. The expansion theory implied that the cold, vast universe we see today had once been a tiny, hot patch …
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24332430-800-what-if-there-was-no-big-bang-and-we-live-in-an-ever-cycling-universe/#ixzz5x38Tuj2A