Wednesday, April 13, 2022

Mild Merciful Amnesia Through Which I've Moved as Through a Blue Atmosphere of Almost and Was

Was reading Jonathan Crary's new *Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World* at kitchen table of the house in Jackson Michigan Monday evening, look up through the window and Sunset Above Septic Tank Lid Orange Cone


Crary yodels what this boy and most of you have been yodeling for years, we are being manipulated and reprogrammed on a daily basis to serve the needs of 24/7 capitalism emphasizing the increase in deviously designed and relentlessly imposed amnesia and its concurrent disorientation in, alienation from, and distrust of your own memory and, speaking only for *me*, makes me worry about my coming dementia if both sides of my family's genes play out and find myself worrying I'm twenty years early 

And yes, I acknowledge the complicit irony that I agree completely with Crary's diagnosis and prognosis of Our Shitlord Future while proving the impossibility of his only solution when I bitch about this house's shitty wifi while admitting like Crary we can only be saved by turning this fucking self-surveillance device and mind-manipulating machine off


The view from the front porch, same sunset, Michigan has great sunsets, often. Yesterday I missed my first ace ever, hitting chains of Hole 7 of Portage Lake Disc Golf Course's basket. Raining today, Toledo Art Museum (if you can, do), then Ann Arbor, you have approximately four hours from this timestamp to text or email me your Winewood order (since we'll be driving right by), two of yinz Durbin Poison bought today, if I don't forget to check my texts and email or forget who you are when I get the text or email




LORD IS NOT A WORD

Christian Wiman

Lord is not a word.
Song is not a salve.
Suffer the child, who lived
on sunlight and solitude.
Savor the man, craving
earth like an aftertaste.
To discover in one's hand
two local stones the size
of a dead man's eyes
saves no one, but to fling them
with a grace you did not know
you knew, to bring them
skimming homing
over blue, is to discover
the river from which they came.
Mild merciful amnesia
through which I've moved
as through a blue atmosphere
of almost and was,
how is it now,
like ruins unearthed by ruin,
my childhood should rise?
Lord, suffer me to sing
these wounds by which I am made
and marred, savor this creature
whose aloneness you ease and are.

9 comments:

  1. 1/regarding dementia - my mother - addicted to cigarettes - died of lung cancer at the age her youngest son is about to attain - she was not afflicted with cognitive decline

    my father was fading in his later years - his last year the card game cribbage became challenging to him - even worse was the loss of skill swallowing, which led the pneumonia that killed him - he was 96

    my stepmother suffered the most - she became nearly nonverbal for the last few years of her life, as well as wheelchair-bound - she also was 96

    in my midseventies i notice memory and processing deficits, but i think my iq and store of general knowledge is still above average - and i set myself, and solved, an algebra problem recently, the first one in decades as far as i know, suggested to me by a daily mail story about a celebrity and his much younger spouse which mentioned their ages

    three years ago she was half his age at that time
    how long until she will be 2/3rds his age?

    as it turns out, the answer is 30 years - he will be more than a century old then

    2/regarding crary's diagnosis and recommended treatment for the terror of the situation - while the problématique globale seems to be developing in ways not necessarily to our advantage, it might be that arrangements not foreseen by crary could ameliorate conditions - as lawrence 'yogi' berra, beloved sports figure of the 20th century who lived to the age of 90, might have said - you never know when something surprising might happen







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  2. He told me three times. For the life of me I can't remember what.

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  3. Hear here what the doctor said. It's such a commonplace notion that algebra is something you'll never need, yet it has designs I cannot resist. So too as I am at one with what Crary says, I just know that something good is going to happen. I don't know when, but just say it mistah!

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  4. as previously noted at this venue

    Something good happen - maybe soon
    Maybe next week - maybe next June


    tinyurl.com/pauthecat

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  5. Nice one. I am reminded how I tell my stews how "eventually" diverges from the German "eventuell" in that eventually means something's definitely gonna happen, we just don't know when, so like "eventuell", which means maybe, it's maybe soon, maybe next week, maybe next June, but at any rate eventually.

    From the flipside of the desert five of the complicit one:
    https://youtu.be/pllRW9wETzw

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  6. aging, algebra, eventually

    1/with regard to eventuality, see rosenberg's version of buddha's five contemplations

    https://www.blckdgrd.com/2014/10/the-stranded-whale-guided-out-of-coves.html

    2/with regard to aging, daily mail gives us another story on age disparities of acquaintances in the entertainment industry

    Meet the glamorous film producer who has won Al Pacino's heart: Inside jet-set life of 81-year-old's girlfriend Noor Alfallah, 28, and her VERY high-profile dating history - from tryst with Mick Jagger, 78, to romance with billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, 60

    Noor, 28, is reportedly dating actor Al, 81, who is 53 years her senior
    They are said to have begun their romance during the pandemic, with a source telling Page Six that the age gap is not a 'problem'
    Al is the latest Hollywood heavyweight to be connected with producer Noor; she was linked with Rolling Stones frontman Mick, 78, in 2017
    Speaking about the romance in 2019, she said that their age gap 'didn't matter to her,' adding: 'The heart doesn't know what it sees, it only knows what it feels'
    After she and Mick parted ways, Noor was linked to director and actor Clint Eastwood, 91, in 2019, however she insisted that the pair were just family friends
    Noor also dated billionaire philanthropist Nicolas, now 60, in 2018; they are thought to have split before her romance with Al began
    She was also spotted enjoying several dates with Hostel director Eli Roth, 49, in 2018
    LA-based Noor was brought up in Beverly Hills and she studied at the UCLA School of Film and Television
    She boasts an impressive network of high-profile friends; she's previously shared photos of herself with A-listers like Sienna Miller and Timothée Chalamet
    Noor is also close friends with Academy Award-nominated producer Brian Grazer, 70, and his wife Veronica

    2.1/the ratio of their current stated ages, expressed as 28/81, when decimalised, becomes an infinitely repeating number

    0.345679012345679012345679012345679...

    3/using algebra, we can compute what year this slightly-over-a-third-as-old young woman will be half al pacino's age, and 2/3rds his age

    simplifying assumptions -

    they have the same birthday,
    "age" means "age at last birthday" - in other words, a step function -

    we are computing the calendar year, not the exact date, for these milestones

    2(28+x) = 81 + x

    56 + 2x = 81 + x

    x = 25

    calendar year 2047

    for her age to be 2/3rd of his age

    3(28+x) = 2(81+x)

    114 + 3x = 162 + 2x

    x = 48

    calendar year 2070

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    Replies
    1. That's impressive enough to lure someone in, but also confounding enough to scare them away. As a more rudimentary user, I don't do much more than cross multiply and solve for x to determine the missing numerator/denominator (when changing the size of a digital image, for example). Perhaps because the base reasoning behind the slightly more complex formula above eludes me, not to mention the skipped step(s) just prior to the final solutions, I went from being the top scorer out of a hundred students in algebra to washing out of trig/pre-calculus in a matter of days.

      Although, I'm just ignorant enough to suggest the Alfallah-Pacino relationship is an asymptotic one: They are destined to grow ever nearer without ever meeting one another.

      By the time she's reached his current number of years of experience, theirs will have gone from one infinite number to almost twice that much. His dominance could be seen to have shrunk by half, though he's likely to have checked out by then, due to the inevitable.

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    2. one hopes that the alfallah-pacino relationship is mutually beneficial, no matter its duration or how it may evolve

      your comment reminds me of the todd rundgren song parallel lines - a performance of which on "the short lived music television show Night Music", from 1989, is one i have first encountered this morning -

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUGZi-6i_Bk

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  7. Your always good for a Rundgren nugget, doc. And something from maybe my favorite teevee that I'd not seen yet!

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