tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45077891808539885072024-03-17T22:42:22.458-07:00Reason and RhymeCoherent discussions of rational innovative ideas and original creative works.dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.comBlogger276125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-54141062458562127612008-06-09T18:08:00.000-07:002008-06-09T18:11:19.917-07:00Ebay Jesus, WTF!<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/200/80614/Richard%20May%20for%20RandR.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/200/80614/Richard%20May%20for%20RandR.jpg" border="0" alt="Richard May headshot" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Richard%20May">Richard May</a>
</p>
<p>
God was an agnostic with lots of self-doubt.
<br/>God sent a dude, Jesus, to straighten out the fundies on Earth,
<br/>hoping that the fundies would become atheists or even devil
<br/>worshipers. God heard Jesus praying and said, "WTF!"
<br/>The Israelites heard Jesus praying and said, "WTF!"
<br/>The Romans heard Jesus praying and said, "WTF!"
<br/>Jesus' prayers were completely dyslexic and unintelligible;
<br/>No one understood what he was praying about.
</p>
<p>
The Romans were pragmatic centrists.
<br/>At first the Romans wanted to sell Jesus on e-Bay,
<br/>with some Tibetans thrown in to sweeten the deal.
<br/>But when wood futures declined in the 2nd quarter,
<br/>they decided upon crucifiction,
<br/>as preferable to hearing Jesus' dyslexic litanies
<br/>or eating cruciform vegetables.
</p>
<p>
May-Tzu
</p>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-79240543017307754182008-06-06T07:57:00.000-07:002008-06-06T08:02:48.810-07:00Proust and me<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/148765/BrianSchwartz.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/148765/BrianSchwartz.jpg" border="0" alt="Brian Schwartz headshot" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Brian%20Schwartz">Brian Schwartz</a>
</p>
<p>
1.
</p>
<p>
It was the summer of 19__. I was at Oxford. I was sixteen. Now Oxford is a big industrial town, a bit gritty, but my college was on the fringes, and out there it was countryside. There were even a few gas lamps by the roadside, and when you walked out beyond, the woods and flowers were far older even than those antiquated lamps, and you got the feeling that you'd escaped from time. When I think of that summer, I think of the sun, pouring down like a blessing, dappling the grassy meadows, setting leaves aglow on a long hedge by whose side a dirt path meandered. I liked to walk that path, and I remember a girl who went with me from time to time. We boated down the narrow stream they call a river, through the fields, through the woodland hugging the water, out past farmhouses and sleeping villages, and I used to row even though you're supposed to use the punt pole, and I remember the splash of the oar and the little band of water droplets gleaming like transitory diamonds.
</p>
<p>
Now there was a whole band of older boys I tried to join. They would come trooping in to tea, all in a group, and since I was young and naive and American, they seemed impossibly elegant, their friendship unattainable, bathed in sunlight, golden. And that summer all they seemed to talk about was Proust. They were all reading it, and from what I could see it deeply moved them. So that was my first impression of Proust, and the name became a sort of magic totem to me, and whenever I think of it, even now, so many years later, it is inextricably tied up with that band of laughing jeunesse dore, and with sunlight on the hedges.
</p>
<p>
2.
</p>
<p>
Shortly after the Great War ended, Proust locked himself in a soundproof room, and there he spent the rest of his life, writing. I don't know if the room had any windows, but I think it didn't. Proust was far away, drifting among sights, smells, sensations, vanished worlds of long ago. I once heard that on one occasion he left his room and traveled halfway across Paris to see a hat which a woman had worn to a party twenty years before. Often, a trivial thing, the sight of a hat, the taste of that famous madeleine, would without warning immerse Proust in a flood of sensation, all the thoughts and feelings he'd had when he had first seen that hat, the way things were for that person who, many years before, had been Proust. For Proust, like all of us, had been many people, his passions and dreams as a child so different from today that his resurrected glimpse into that child's world was like a view into an alien mind. And, like a master quilter stitching a work of art out of rags and snippets, out of those tastes, those glimpses, those fears and passions recalled, he built his novel.
</p>
<span id="fullpost">
<p>
For "Remembrance of Things Past" is indeed a novel, fiction, though it is easy enough to forget this. For one thing, Proust was homosexual, so there was no Albertine. Or in a way there was, there were a thousand Albertines, a thousand people in each of whom he found a bit of Albertine. And this is true of all the characters that inhabit the humdrum yet bizarre, generic (in the sense in which truths about it are applicable to any group of people) yet unforgettable world that springs to being in these pages.
</p>
<p>
Reading this novel, unlike any other, we demand that there be some link with Proust's actual life. The characters are fiction, the events are fiction, more or less, but the sensations must be real. Proust actually felt them, all those incessant longings and anger and fear. This link to reality is necessary because Proust claims to have written, not merely a novel, but a treatise of psychology, a guide to, if not understanding the world, at the very least a hint on how to view it.
</p>
<p>
Or showing that other views are possible... by allowing us a glimpse into another person's world (or into his world as a ten-year-old, which he considers that of another person than his adult self), he also allows us to see the laws and processes common to both. He wrote this in the midst of a discussion on the goal (or, better, Holy Grail) of art:
<blockquote>
"To grasp again our life -- and also the life of others; for style is for the writer, as for the painter, a question, not of technique but of vision. It is the revelation -- impossible by direct and conscious means -- of the qualitative differences in the way the world appears to us, differences which, but for art, would remain the eternal secret of each of us. Only by art can we get outside ourselves, know what another sees of his universe, which is not the same as ours and the different views of which would otherwise have remained as unknown to us as those there may be on the moon."
</blockquote>
</p>
<p>
I've written elsewhere that sometimes it seems as if as if Proust and Wittgenstein (who after all was his comtemporary and in some ways grew up in the same milieu) were covering the same territory. The limits of language, the existence yet utter unknowability of the other, the tragedy of longing and yearning and loving that which must always elude our grasp. Wittgenstein seems to map the boundary, Proust strives to push and struggle and expand it every way he can, using music and art as another, more basic language to describe or at least indicate entities whose essence we cannot fathom. And the composer Vinteuil and painter Elstir, who make their appearance in the novel, are not based on real artists at all. Rather, they are fictional creations invented by Proust because in his long descriptions of their fictional compositions, he can expound his view of the world. The long description of Vinteuil's sonata uses the music to hint at other worlds which are infinitely precious and totally, except as glimpsed in art, beyond our ken... glimmering dings an sich which we cannot hope to know but which give life its value.
</p>
<p>
And in the end, the fictional, as well as the real, Proust remains a hazy enigma. Thousands and thousands of pages, and so much is left out. Years and years skipped over, the most important events barely alluded to, or left out for the reader to deduce. And yet, we grasp the essence. And what a tragedy it is! "The heart changes," wrote Proust, "and that is our worst misfortune." Yet for Proust it was not so much change as an endless, painful cycle, which he fully perceived but was powerless to escape. An intense fear of abandonment pervades his earliest memories, and whenever he met a girl whom he feared would cuckold him, this fear was triggered and its intensity would make him fall in love with her. Of course, his fear was a prudent instinct and would be triggered only by the sort of girl who would betray him repeatedly, incurably. But without this jealousy, for Proust there was no love. Quite literally, love -- the thing for which he lived his life -- was pain.
</p>
<p>
For Proust, the things which give most of us life's joy and meaning -- friendship and helping others -- were a waste of time. And so he spent his life being blown about by his twisted love, searching love's unattainable happiness. And yet, as his book proved, it was not really love, or happiness, or gratification he was after. It was a search for the reality of things, pursued with such zeal and devotion that he gave up all for it, became a hermit with more rigor than the most religious monk for it, and ultimately died for it. I've always thought that the gap from qualia, from sense-perception, to a deeper reality was unbridgeable. But somehow Proust leapt across it, carried perhaps on wings of angels.
</p>
</span>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-49670914875828126632007-12-31T17:58:00.000-08:002007-12-31T18:18:33.010-08:00Ma<p>
by Neha Nambiar
</p>
<p>
The man sat at the table, his steady gaze never leaving the door… did it really
happen? Was it all over? Hadn’t his life just begun? What was it? He couldn’t tell
anymore, he didn’t know. "Am I even alive!” he shouted out. He always knew
things would go wrong… they were bound to, but this?
</p>
<p>
As a child he always 'knew' he would be famous. Or rather was supposed to,
he saw himself giving interviews and answering questions. He saw himself
inspiring the youth. "19 and already there! Susheel Sain does it all…"
Susheel Sain does it… yes, that’s what he did. Everything. Everything
wrong? But was doing nothing at all, doing everything wrong? What was he
thinking, what was he saying? Every sound, movement was just a blur, the world
seemed surreal now…he didn’t even know he was breathing… didn’t remember
he was supposed to. All he could think of now was the fact that he was supposed
to be famous. Ha! WAS GOD MOCKING HIM RIGHT NOW? “GOD! WHERE ARE
MY PRAYERS NOW, WHAT HAPPENED TO MY FAITH LORD... WHAT?” HE’S 30
NOW….Susheel Sain -- his name, Susheel... The sound of his name kept repeating
inside… That voice! Who was it! His mother flashed in front of him. His heart took
a giant leap…ma….a huge thump caught hold of all his emotions he wanted his
ma…"Ma”... “Ma” is all he said….ma. "You didn’t do anything wrong ma…
don’t worry"
</p>
<p>
Over protective perhaps, but just another mother? Nah! His mom was the best
ever! A woman so self sacrificing, he had never seen… pa was a good man too,
a little disconnected but pa was good… “My idol” as he wrote in his journals.
He always felt a little guilty, writing in a journal, he didn’t need one -- Ma and pa
were the best. He had no issues… women. Yeah well growing up, those alien
creatures always gave him the jitters. “How can men be expected to talk to
women? They were scary!” But he found his woman, it was the first time he wasn’t
afraid… the first time he lost his virginity. The first time he felt like there was
someone, a woman. If not better, as divine as his ma. For the first time. “Paro!
What’ll they do! What’ll I do!? Ma help! Paro help!” he spoke. The sound of sirens
magnified to a thousand times more, made the hair on his skin stand. He was
freezing, his fingers numb. He was now aware of the world around him.
Where was he? He began to rub his hands together for some warmth...his hand!
He shrieked. He jumped and hid under a broken table in the dusty room…
shivers went down his spine. He started to look around now…broken windows,
a leaking ceiling; a drop of water, or whatever it was fell on the table, must
have been a heavy drop, he thought he heard it fall. That minuscule drop found
its way down a crack on the top of the table and trickled down the diminutive
crack, he could hear it travel…dab! It fell on the floor; he looked down at the
drop of liquid, squashed. Blood, guns, a face crying with an expression of
shock beyond understanding, then a look of disgust flashed in front of his
mind's eye, as he stared at the insignificant drop. At first, the images
zoomed -- fast like the cameras of a photographer… Click, click, click, click…
And then a silent slow movement of the images. A slow click. The slowest
ever. C…l…i…c…k, and he was back... “Ma”! He cried softly… and then
chuckled… chuckled like a baby… "she’d never let the floor be so dirty”.
He cried again.
</p>
<span id="fullpost">
<p>
Ma was always clean, he guessed that was how she kept herself from crying
and being sad… ma was sad wasn’t she? Paro and she always got
along... Life was so perfect. Perfectly sad.
</p>
<p>
Growing up ‘his world’ was always sad. “Why am I so unhappy? Why can’t
I laugh or smile freely without feeling this lump of sadness in me?” Words
form his journal. "Ma and pa are the best, I love them, then why do 'they' tell
me to hate them? I don’t like being in their company you know, but they’re
just always there. I think the only time I‘m free is when I’m asleep: and ma
and pa and Paro are all with me, laughter everywhere, and Paro looks
angelic... And ma… oh... so beautiful!” “Ma was so beautiful” he whispered.
</p>
<p>
Was -- ma was. The sirens kept getting louder and disappearing. “Where am I?
SHUT UP!” he screamed. “I WANT TO GO HOME! I WANT TO GO TO MA!”
screamed Susheel of thirty… whose life long dream was about to come true --
he was going to be famous now. Going to. "SHUT UP!” he screamed again.
"Leave me alone. Leave me alone, PARO!” HE CRIED, CRIED LIKE PARO
WAS DEAD IN FRONT OF HIM. “PARO!” HE BEGAN TO SWAY HIS BODY
ROUGHLY… LEFT…. RIGHT… "PARO!” this man wept... Wept like a teenager…
a rebelling teenager realising all the rebellion was just for no cause…
"Paro, how could ma cheat me like this? Treat me like... how could she hurt me,
the one woman I loved, perhaps more than Paro, how could ma hurt me?”
</p>
<p>
“Paro, beautiful, intelligent Paro. The woman who made him feel free. After 25
years of the 'crazy' life he led, Paro was his answer from god. His angel, his
muse. Paro was his heart and soul. “She was! She was there with me, I held her,
I made love to her for Christ’s sake! Paro was there, and Paro is there! My life!
I felt her soul, and she felt mine, Paro!” He had stopped crying now but was still
shaking. His knees pointed up, with his arms around them to ‘shelter’ him from 'them'.
His bloodshot eyes, now widened, his face for the first time not afraid, but defiant.
Not hidden behind the cover of his knees, he looked ahead, as if at someone and
screamed, “HOW COULD SHE TELL ME SHE NEVER WAS THERE? NEVER
EXISTED? MY IMAGINATION? MY PARO! A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION! MA
TELLING ME THIS! MY MA! AFTER MISSING THE DAY MY WEDDING WAS TO BE..!
TODAY...” He seemed to calm down now... "She was to be my wife today. MY WIFE!
AND MA MISSED IT! And she tells me PARO WAS NEVER THERE!” Tears crawled
down his burnt cheek. An hour had passed now since he was where he was, crying
for almost the entire hour, his cheeks burnt, but he cried anyway. His jaws hurt, but
he spoke to 'them' anyway, because in a way, they knew everything. He spoke with
tears and a shaky voice to them, about his mother trying to convince him that Paro
was his imagination, a girl he’d created because he could never 'really’ speak to
someone of the opposite sex. He made her up to complete his “inadequacy” as
she had put it. To make up for the void in his life through his imagination! His ma,
his very own ma told him this. He’d never hurt her, always been her boy, then why
would ma hurt him that way? He couldn’t understand. Nothing made sense
anymore.
</p>
<p>
He looked down at the spot where the liquid had dropped, the dust around had
soaked it all, and a small brown patch was all that was left in its place. Gone, just
like that. Just like his Paro. His head hurt like a million volts of electricity had just
been sent through it, only it wasn’t going anywhere. It just stayed there, inside his
head and fed on it, chewed on his flesh from within. They want him gone. Flashes
had begun again, only more clear this time: the face -- it was ma! That look! Why was
she looking so horrified, who was she looking at? Those were the clothes she
wore when he was talking to her, fighting with her, asking her why she had missed
his wedding, why she hadn’t blessed them. Didn’t she love Paro as much as he did?
She had loved her before, what happened? Yes! Ma was talking to him, crying to him,
trying to hold him and all of a sudden she was. SHE WAS LOOKING AT HIM THAT
WAY! THE GUN! WHERE’S THE GUN! BLOOD WAS ALL OVER THE FLOOR;
THE WORLD WAS GETTING BRIGHTER, yet coming to an end. HE WAS GOING
TO BE FAMOUS. “I did it! Ha, ha, I did it!” he laughed his eyes so red it seemed like
blood would drip out of them if he kept them open any longer, or didn’t calm himself
down. Anyway, blood would spill. Blood had already been spilled. "I DID IT," he
screamed. "I KILLED MY MA! I KILLED HER!“ Crying, calming down, HE WAS CRAZY!
“She looked at me that way," he said. "I had the gun, Paro, Paro never… their, ma
don’t say that. ma, please don’t say that. Paro will be my wife whether… whether
you like it or not.” He was running around, talking to himself, looking at his ma on
the floor -- blood spewed everywhere, wounds in her head, her heart her stomach: a
bullet for everything he despised in her. Her mind -- so sick that she would say
something so unimaginable to him. Her heart -- she could never have loved him.
Her stomach -- that she gave birth to him, made him want to tear his skin off and watch
himself bleed to clean himself of the dirt. He spoke now: ”I had to kill you ma, you
became sick in the head. The world would never accept you. I had to kill you ma.
I had to.”
</p>
<p>
Early morning, the sun as bright and uninteresting as ever. The grass its usual
green… and the birds? Well they just flew innocently like the world was a happy
place. And Susheel Sain woke up to a beautiful day, not the weather, not the
innocence, just Paro -- she was with him, sleeping while he looked out the barred
windows of the National Institute for the Mentally Ill. All was fine. Paro was
pregnant. Susheel smiled, life couldn’t get better.
</p>
<p>
A car rolled in the driveway -- ma, on her daily routine now, for the past ten years.
She came to feed her son of 30. God really worked things out didn’t he?
</p>
</span>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-62385041211694574842007-12-31T17:48:00.000-08:002007-12-31T17:50:17.070-08:00Saving the Earth for Artificial Transnational-Corporate Life Forms<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/200/80614/Richard%20May%20for%20RandR.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/200/80614/Richard%20May%20for%20RandR.jpg" border="0" alt="Richard May headshot" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Richard%20May">Richard May</a>
</p>
<p>
Maybe lemming genes could be inserted into human DNA, in order to save the planet for cybernetic corporations staffed by artificial life forms. But it's important that big corporations, the highest form of sentient entities generated by evolution, live on.
Can corporations exist and thrive without humans, as totally roboticized entities to carry the global economy to the stars? But man must serve the economy in the end times of profit taking.
</p>
<p>
This corporate upgrade will initially be opposed by socialist Luddites, who wish to preserve human DNA, perhaps using messy wetware cyborgs, and by the traditional bioform religious. So a new religion ought to be designed to facilitate the transition to advanced-corporate life forms and the long overdue phasing out of humanity as primitive, inefficient and low-profit. "God" can be replaced by the myth of a celestial CEO, good and evil equated to profit and loss and the afterlife redefined as service on a vast corporate board. Without low-profit eaters the transnational corporate economy can expand endlessly to the stars.
</p>
<p>
May-Tzu
</p>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-59063276290714884712007-12-20T23:09:00.000-08:002007-12-20T23:17:21.941-08:00My Father, the Talker<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoRj3VAVtDl84kPNU6gmFZ9Ls1IPzRH4O-Jh3VpIyKsYJKXuX8_tYeflfbkp-zH5ZjRdti6yWBno6J4xmOAPMHEsTyBRB2oSmDRVN0TY9171FJr5qR9os67Agkpq6so7VXkpwHCkG2HQk/s1600-h/Jolanda+Dubbeldam.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoRj3VAVtDl84kPNU6gmFZ9Ls1IPzRH4O-Jh3VpIyKsYJKXuX8_tYeflfbkp-zH5ZjRdti6yWBno6J4xmOAPMHEsTyBRB2oSmDRVN0TY9171FJr5qR9os67Agkpq6so7VXkpwHCkG2HQk/s200/Jolanda+Dubbeldam.JPG" border="0" alt="Jolanda Dubbeldam" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5078949455521828658" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Jolanda%20Dubbeldam">Jolanda Dubbeldam</a>
</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrssKC8GeYD_cbr6iRFW1qozFjtJDGQtTt-RbEbRxaZCJSqDoWhnokYBf0wuRflHzdwfbFeO4rBBARiO0clckdLzgiUoPm5_md4KyScDnr2QmvdUAAeYeqPscm36n8_cAI9iRhld8Rpjs/s1600-h/opam.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrssKC8GeYD_cbr6iRFW1qozFjtJDGQtTt-RbEbRxaZCJSqDoWhnokYBf0wuRflHzdwfbFeO4rBBARiO0clckdLzgiUoPm5_md4KyScDnr2QmvdUAAeYeqPscm36n8_cAI9iRhld8Rpjs/s400/opam.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5146321503585387538" /></a>
<p>
I push open the front door, dragging a swoosh of cold air in with me.
</p>
<p>
“I’m home!”
</p>
<p>
I walk towards the living room, breathing in the smell of fresh coffee and vanilla candles. Warmth envelopes me as I peel off my coat, damp with late fall drizzle - thank goodness we fixed that heater before temperatures dropped to these goosebump levels. My parents are sitting where I left them. My mother in the middle of the sofa with plenty of elbow room for her knitting. Row by row a small sweater grows beneath her hands, alternating bands of green, orange and brown wool, a sweater for an anonymous Afghani child who may be a little less chilly this winter, may feel a little more hopeful. My father sits across from her in the light armchair that seems too snug for his tall frame. I guess he adjusted the floor lamp to shine directly overhead onto the book he is reading, compensating for diminishing eyesight; he is bathed in light. He peers over his reading glasses as I enter the room.
</p>
<p>
“So, how did it go? What was the lesson about?"
</p>
<p>
“No lesson tonight, some of us got together and spent a couple of quiet hours working in the library.”
</p>
<p>
“Ah, not a class then. Like a workgroup. How many of you were there?”
</p>
<p>
“Just the four of us.”
</p>
<p>
“What are you working on?"
</p>
<p>
My father, always the talker. That thirst for conversation, though questions are often just a precursor for the role he really revels in, that of orator. A one-man discussion of information, opinions, presentation of pros and cons - second speaker not required. My father the talker likes to do his thinking out loud.
</p>
<p>
“Dad, do you remember when I asked you and mom to write down your experiences as children during the war?"
</p>
<p>
My father has forgotten. I suppose that makes sense, even though his childhood in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation is a subject he often returns to, its weight heavy on his memory and the shape it gave to his life. A few years ago it occurred to me that these stories might one day be lost to the family forever if someone did not record them. So I asked my parents and in-laws to write down what they remembered of those times. I described my somewhat unspecific vision of processing their memories into an accessible, comprehensive story. Not looking so much for the history of it, but for the emotions, the childhood human experience.
</p>
<p>
What I got was a different kind of thing. The two omas were initially unsure what to write about, feeling their memories were perhaps too small, not riveting enough. Untrue, of course. Daily life, fears very relatable, anecdotes that opened a window to those days. My mother described a world of small houses, stern Catholicism, fear of omnipresent soldiers, yet at the same time remembered herself skipping through much of it, being just a little girl. Then the opas. I was familiar with parts of my father’s story, yet he too lifted up the veil just a little higher to show more intimate aspects of his youth. He steered clear of emotion, though. Descriptions of the facts were enough. Some things even he cannot express, it seems. My husband's father, the academic, the college professor, also stayed true to his character. He submitted a thesis-like document, full of technical background information about the war, bombs, and precisely which neighborhoods were demolished. He is an introvert, this opa. He is not a talker.
</p>
<p>
Initially I felt somewhat at a loss, having expected something else, until I realized that they were simply responding to my request: a description of events as each had experienced them, in whatever form they chose. Write about what was most important to you, I said. It doesn't matter how. Do what feels right. And so they did.
</p>
<p>
Now that I had the stories, I did not know what to do with them - how to do them justice. They were written in Dutch, and I thought to translate them to English, making them more accessible to our increasingly global extended family. Also because English is the language I write in. But should I translate them as they were, and so preserve each individual voice? Or should I translate the essence of them into a single, more flowing story, cutting out repetition and ambiguity? How could I best meld these diverse testaments into a unity of some sort? I was intimidated by the responsibility of it. Finally, I put it aside, and in time, forgot about it.
</p>
<p>
Now something about having my parents here in my living room has triggered my memory, and I resolve to blow the dust off the project, and finally find a way to move forward.
</p>
<p>
My mother does remember.
</p>
<p>
“Ja, opa, a few years ago she asked us and we wrote about the war and we sent it to America in an email.”
</p>
<p>
“Well, it is always better to do these things with talking," my father turns to me. "You should have an interview, and prepare questions, and then record everything on one of those little tape machines. Did I tell you about that time I was interviewed for a book about my old friend Karel, the one who became quite a famous writer?"
</p>
<p>
My father tells me. Perhaps he is right about the interview. But the fact that my parents will be returning home to the Netherlands in two weeks while I stay indefinitely in my new home across the ocean makes this an untenable approach. I recoil from the prospect of another never-ending project resting in my computer, waiting for the right moment to proceed.
</p>
<p>
“Today I started working on your stories. I am translating them, and afterwards we can work together on any blanks that turn up until the stories are complete. We will keep them for the family.”
</p>
<p>
It is a start. And I am, at heart, a writer, not a talker.
</p>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-23188914245663431972007-12-17T08:34:00.000-08:002007-12-17T08:58:09.588-08:00The Candidate<p>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Paul%20Maxim">Paul Maxim</a>
</p>
<p style="float: right; margin: 4px; padding: 4px; border: thin solid gray; text-align: center;">
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUM3KagP_Xj_-CRKiUfOZ54-NdeHlr6Y8FUcrxuauCjo8nJntI2n2hlXGDCK5UU-H88YHB6eOE8cBBPkLHX-48f_N7vMCZAYoaxiZ46PT_kLxGs6rMHYC0pucQgUEYmkU7ODex97R-2-o/s1600-h/THE+CANDIDATE_html_34e544a5.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUM3KagP_Xj_-CRKiUfOZ54-NdeHlr6Y8FUcrxuauCjo8nJntI2n2hlXGDCK5UU-H88YHB6eOE8cBBPkLHX-48f_N7vMCZAYoaxiZ46PT_kLxGs6rMHYC0pucQgUEYmkU7ODex97R-2-o/s320/THE+CANDIDATE_html_34e544a5.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5144986030749336578" /></a>
<br/><em>Mario Biaggi</em>
</p>
<p>
Republican Congressman
MARIO BIAGGI
(a former cop),
running for mayor
of New York City
on a Law and Order platform,
climaxed his campaign
by telling a group
of Harlem democratic voters
(with apparent sincerity)
"Bless your black hearts!"
</p>
<p>
PS.: Yes, this really happened...
<br/>
P.P.S.: No, he didn't win...
<br/>P.P.P.S.: Long live democracy!
</p>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-41981229651378388532007-12-12T17:02:00.001-08:002007-12-12T17:22:06.687-08:00Essay: The Ode<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/619519/Maria.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/619519/Maria.jpg" border="0" alt="Maria Claudia Faverio headshot" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Maria%20Claudia%20Faverio">Maria Claudia Faverio</a>
</p>
<p>
The ode is a poetry form that originated in Greece, where it was
called <i>aeidein</i>, which simply meant
"song". It was usually a choric
song accompanied by a dance.
</p>
<p>
The first type of ode we will examine in this paper is of a
ceremonious and dignified nature, commemorating the gods and the
heroes of the past and emphasizing moral episodes, and is called
the choral or Pindaric ode in honour of the Theban poet Pindar
(ca 518-442 BC)<sup><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name=
"sdfootnote1anc" href="#sdfootnote1sym" id=
"sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a></sup>. It comprises three
parts: the strophe, of a complex metrical structure, the
antistrophe, mirroring the opening, and the epode, of a different
length and in a different meter from the first two parts. The
strophe (two or more lines repeated as a unit) was sung by the
chorus, which was answered by another group in the metrically
harmonious antistrophe. The two groups would then sing together
in the epode (a summary line). More often it was the same group
that first sang the strophe while dancing to the right, the
antistrophe while dancing to the left, and the epode while
standing still in the middle of the stage. More stanzas could
follow patterned on the first three, in any pattern the poet
wished, the pattern of the first three stanzas was then repeated
at the end of the poem.
</p>
<p>
Pindar's four books of epinicion odes, rich in
complex metaphors, greatly influenced the Western world since
their publication by Aldus Manutius in 1513. The games themselves
were to Pindar actually only a means to deal with themes of wider
and deeper significance and therefore have universal value.
</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEdxVFQz1V-RvvNo6cJNyAcG8-AAo1lRljK7cYB86EGymfotsCc7GKrp-SG5QA9sVoTrUBKwSL3uXLOws0b1z0WtQ6Xdp1h2E9updfNbtg6Ua16WZHM8irCiflDaxmiMXyWQzCYB9U44M/s1600-h/Grecian+Urn+2.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEdxVFQz1V-RvvNo6cJNyAcG8-AAo1lRljK7cYB86EGymfotsCc7GKrp-SG5QA9sVoTrUBKwSL3uXLOws0b1z0WtQ6Xdp1h2E9updfNbtg6Ua16WZHM8irCiflDaxmiMXyWQzCYB9U44M/s400/Grecian+Urn+2.JPG" border="0" alt="Grecian urn" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5143260837754574882" /></a>
<span id="fullpost">
<p>
The Pindaric ode was first adapted to the vernacular language
with the publication of Pierre de Ronsard's four books of French
"Odes"(1550). The first English
poet who claims to have written a Pindaric ode was a certain John
Soothern in a volume published in 1584. He was soon followed by
others, like Michael Drayton.
</p>
<p>
Many of the great poets of the past have written Pindaric odes,
although sometimes their work doesn't follow
all classical rules, as is the case for example with
Milton's great ode<sup><a class=
"sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote2anc" href="#sdfootnote2sym" id=
"sdfootnote2anc"><sup>2</sup></a></sup>"On the
Morning of Christ's Nativity"
(1629). This poem, suspended between the great events of the past
and the future, dispenses with the typical triadic form; it
consists of a prelude of four stanzas followed by a hymn of
twenty-seven stanzas.
</p>
<p>
Only a few decades later Abraham Cowley, who will be mentioned
later in this paper, went even further and gave up the metrical
and stanzaic forms of the Pindaric ode, while still calling his
odes Pindaric, remarking that he followed the
"spirit" rather than the letter of
his original. Cowley was greatly admired by John Dryden
(1631-1700), who followed his example of irregular Pindarics,
emphasizing that his most important rule was that
"the ear must preside and direct the judgement
to the choice of numbers", a principle whose most
renowned achievement is
"Alexander's
Feast", an ode in honour of St. Cecilia in which
Dryden skilfully manipulates and adapts his metres and sounds to
the different emotions described in the poem. Its purpose is a
combined critique of music and poetry framed in the modern idea
of harmony. There are not many good irregular Pindaric odes after
this in spite of many attempts.
</p>
<p>
One of the most remarkable writers of classical Pindarics was
Thomas Gray (1716-71), whose greatest achievements in this form
are "The Progress of Poesy" and
"The Bard", poems full of oblique,
sometimes intricate allusions and striking images, like
Pindar's poems, and having poetry itself as
their subject matter, poetry as a life-giving force subduing
negative passions, and art as catharsis and sublimation. Gray
also wrote Horatian odes, like the famous and light-hearted
"On the Death of a Favourite Cat"
and the "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton
College", an ode in which childhood races past with
depressing speed.
</p>
<p>
The Horatian ode, the second main type of ode, is so called in
honour of the Latin poet Horace (65-8 BC), and has been of much
greater impact on the English ode than the Pindaric ode. It was
normally written in regular stanzas, following the pattern set in
the first stanza. It dealt with reflective and intimate themes,
like friendship and love, and was usually quite serene in tone.
Horace himself was a keen observer and practised Epicureanism.
Even when he dealt with personal problems, like the ode in which
he addressed Pyrrha's inconstancy (an ode
translated by Milton), he did so to universalize sorrow and
certain characteristics of human nature. His odes contain
unforgettable eloquence and wisdom in their simplicity.
</p>
<p>
Horace was known in the Middle Ages, but hardly imitated. One of
the earliest English versions of the Horatian ode was produced by
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-47). After him, Horace was
imitated by many other poets. One of the most remarkable poems
written after Horace in the 17<sup>th</sup>century was Andrew
Marvell's "An Horatian Ode
upon Cromwell's Return from
England", a poem that imitates
Horace's odes celebrating Augustus in the
concision of the language and the rapid succession of the images.
The stanza form used in this poem seems to have been devised by
Marvell himself. He uses two four-stress lines followed by two
three-stress lines to achieve an equivalent of the Horatian
Alcaic strophe in the English language.
</p>
<p>
Another notable Horatian was Cowley, who seems to have influenced
Pope's "Ode to
Solitude". Pope said of Cowley:
"Who now reads Cowley? / Forget his epic, nay
Pindaric art, / Yet still I love the language of his
heart." And indeed, his bombastic Pindaric odes are
much inferior to his Horatian ones. The same can be said of Pope.
His attempt at the Pindaric form in "Ode for
Music on St. Cecilia's Day" is
usually considered of quite low quality on the whole.
</p>
<p>
In more modern times, the Horatian ode was primarily revived by
Matthew Prior, Mark Akenside, William Collins, who takes a middle
course between a protean naturalization and a hymnal monotheism
and poses a number of interlaced questions in his volume of odes
(published in 1747), as well as Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson
in the 18<sup>th</sup>century, a century in which poetry was
deeply affected by Horace, and Matthew Arnold in the
19<sup>th</sup>century. In his "Horatian
Echo" (1847), Arnold distances himself from the
political concerns and turmoils of his time to express a gentle
melancholy and subtle carpe-diem mentality.
</p>
<p>
Modern odes in the English language usually have an irregular
pattern, but they do have a rhyming and stanza scheme. They also
have some common characteristics, such as a) a dignified,
elaborate subject matter; b) emotion and imagination; c) the
subject in whose honour the poem is written is usually addressed
directly (less frequently than formerly though); d) they are
written to be read aloud; and they are of e) a lyrical nature
originating in personal impulses and rising to more general
reflections.
</p>
<p>
From the Romantic period onwards, no clear distinction is usually
made any more between Pindaric and Horatian odes in the English
language, and since the late 19<sup>th</sup>century, poets seem
to be reluctant to call their poems odes, even when they show
distinctive ode-like qualities, like Arnold's
"Dover Beach" and
Hopkins's "The Wreck of the
Deutschland".
</p>
<p>
Some of the greatest modern odes include
Wordsworth's "Ode:
Intimations of Immortality",
Shelley's "Ode to the West
Wind", Keats's
"Ode to the Nightingale" and
Tennyson's "Ode on the
Death of the Duke of Wellington".
</p>
<p>
In his ode, which is essentially a free Pindaric poem as
established by Cowley and perfected by Dryden, Wordsworth
addresses an emotional crisis of his own life, ageing, which
gives him occasion to reflect upon immortality. He starts with a
clear definition of his personal problem and then expands this
view by referring to two Platonic notions of immortality and by
applying them to life in general, pondering that life has only
apparently been impoverished by the loss of the
"visionary gleam" of childhood.
The recollection of such pure experience can renew its awareness
in us, taking us back to a childhood state of bliss and faith in
a moral order for which Nature can provide appropriate symbols.
Coleridge based his "Dejection: An
Ode", whose sixth stanza was described by Eliot as
"one of the saddest confessions that I have
ever read", on Wordsworth's
"Immortality Ode", to which it was
partly intended to be a reply. Coleridge's
poem is much stormier than Wordsworth's and is
also set in a more violent natural environment.
</p>
<p>
Shelley's "Ode to the West
Wind" is a political poem that should be read with
relaxed attention rather than analysed word for word. Much more
important in this poem are the sound and the connotation of each
word and phrase, as well as the feelings it evokes. It is a poem
written in the Italian <i>terza rima</i>and using the wind as a
symbol of inspiration (like Coleridge's
"Dejection"), as well as the
Romantic image of the Aeolian harp. In addition, again like
Coleridge's
"Dejection", it uses the image of
the renovation of the spirit to depict the renovation of society.
The wind, which for Shelley can enforce continuity between the
natural imperialism of the past and the natural republicanism of
the future, can also be compared to Keats's
nightingale as a symbol of continuity and omnipresence.
"To a Skylark" is written in the
same evocative, suggestive mood.
</p>
<p>
Keats wrote odes universally regarded as above criticism and,
like Shelley's odes, far more traditional in
their structure of argument than those of Wordsworth or
Coleridge. The themes of his poetry are the themes to which poets
have returned again and again and again. The
nightingale's song in "Ode
to a Nightingale"<sup><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name=
"sdfootnote3anc" href="#sdfootnote3sym" id=
"sdfootnote3anc"><sup>3</sup></a></sup>suggests a realm of ideal
beauty and blissful immortality as contrasted with
"the weariness, the fever, and the
fret" of life. The rejection of the real world in
favour of an ideal one are also to be intensely felt in
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" (a poem
representing the Romantic ideal of Hellenism) and in
"Ode to Melancholy", although in a
less resolute way, in a mood overshadowed by a melancholic
acceptance.
</p>
<p>
According to many critics, Keats's best ode is
"To Autumn", a poem rich in not
only visual, but also kinaesthetic and tactile images as well as
onomatopoeia, and a poem in which Keats rejoices in the meaning
of autumn, the acceptance of change and decay as part of life:
"Thou hast thy music too". It is
striking that there are no leaves in this poem dedicated to
autumn, a season traditionally associated with the falling of
leaves, while there are leaves in three of his other odes.
</p>
<p>
Here is the ode "To Autumn" in
full:
<blockquote>
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,<br>
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;<br>
Conspiring with him how to load and bless<br>
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;<br>
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,<br>
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;<br>
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells<br>
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,<br>
And still more, later flowers for the bees,<br>
Until they think warm days will never cease,<br>
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.<br>
<br>
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?<br>
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find<br>
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,<br>
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;<br>
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,<br>
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook<br>
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;<br>
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep<br>
Steady thy laden head across a brook;<br>
Or, by a cyder-press, with patient look,<br>
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.<br>
<br>
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?<br>
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-<br>
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,<br>
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;<br>
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn<br>
Among the river sallows, borne aloft<br>
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;<br>
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;<br>
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft<br>
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;<br>
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
</blockquote>
</p>
<p>
Tennyson called his "Ode on the Death of the
Duke of Wellington" "a fine
rolling anthem" with a recurrent rhyming on low,
dark-toned vowels echoing like a tolling bell and thus
reinforcing the message of the poem. It is written in a Victorian
tone, not the nostalgic tone of the Romantic poets we have just
examined, and its reflections and imagery are clearly those of
the author of "In Memoriam".
</p>
<p>
Other poets of the Victorian age include Landor, Swinburne,
Thompson and Patmore.
</p>
<p>
The best ode of the 20<sup>th</sup>century is most probably the
"Ode to the Confederate Dead" by
Allen Tate, in which we feel the autumnal desolation of the
graveyard and the poet's grief accentuated by
his reserve.
</p>
<p>
Another ode worthy of mention is Louis
MacNeice's
"Ode", written in the form of a
prayer for his son in a quite simple, casual style, a poem that
accepts the limitations of human life and sadly also acknowledges
the imminence of the war.
</p>
<p>
There have been many more odes written in the
20<sup>th</sup>century, although many of them were not called as
such in their titles, as has already been mentioned. Auden,
Yeats, Dylan Thomas and many others all wrote odes, in spite of
their reluctance to call their poems odes, mainly because they
didn't want to commit themselves to a
dignified style and because of a certain aversion to
classification typical of our time.
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
References:
</p>
<p>
Britannica 2002 Deluxe Edition
</p>
<p>
Fry, P., The Poet's Calling in the English
Ode, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1980
</p>
<p>
Hamilton, E. and Livingston J., Form and Feeling, Longman,
Melbourne 1981
</p>
<p>
Heath-Stubbs, J., The Ode, Oxford University Press, London 1969
</p>
<p>
Jump, J., The Ode, Methuen & Co. Ltd., London 1974
</p>
<p>
Stillman, F., The Poet's Manual and Rhyming
Dictionary, Thames and Hudson (1978)
</p>
<p>
www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5784
</p>
<hr/>
</p>
<div id="sdfootnote1">
<p>
<a class="sdfootnotesym" name="sdfootnote1sym" href=
"#sdfootnote1anc" id="sdfootnote1sym">1</a> Pindar had adopted
this form from Stesichorus (7<sup>th</sup>-6<sup>th</sup>
centuries BC).
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote2">
<p>
<a class="sdfootnotesym" name="sdfootnote2sym" href=
"#sdfootnote2anc" id="sdfootnote2sym">2</a> Milton
didn't actually call any of his poems odes.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote3">
<p>
<a class="sdfootnotesym" name="sdfootnote3sym" href=
"#sdfootnote3anc" id="sdfootnote3sym">3</a> Keats conceived a
new kind of ode in his "Ode to the
Nightingale", based on a ten-line stanza in iambic
pentameter except for the eighth line, in iambic trimeter. The
rhyme scheme is ababcdecde.
</p>
<p>
<br>
</p>
<p>
<br>
</p>
</div>
</span>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-4290131537535581832007-12-07T06:09:00.000-08:002007-12-07T06:13:51.257-08:00Keynote<p>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Paul%20Maxim">Paul Maxim</a>
</p>
<p>
Albinone wrote fifty-three operas,
<br/>none of which survived,
<br/>while Beethoven wrote only one,
<br/>all of which survived,
<br/>including four overtures,
<br/>three entr'actes, two intermezzi,
<br/>and one horrendous climax,
<br/>in which a caste of singers clambers back onstage,
<br/>and helps extract the tenor from his queasy cage.
</p>
<p>
But Rossini, nimble tunesmith,
<br/>outdid them all
<br/>by writing only half an opera
<br/>- called Semiramide* -
<br/>about an ancient Babylonian Princess
<br/>(or maybe she was just a Quean)
<br/>who thought she could reshape the course of history -
<br/>but why she thought so still remains a mystery.
</p>
<p>
Now, had that tunester only written
<br/>one whole Ramide
<br/>- it might have seemed a trifle overlong,
<br/>- it might have lacked a dance to fleshify its song,
<br/>but still most likely it would not have made him smirk
<br/>(as rumor swears he did):
<br/>"Half an opera she is better than none,
<br/>and mine have coined more lira than yours
<br/>have ever done!'
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
* Pronounced Seh.mee.RAH .mi.day
</p>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-74489507759774209852007-11-25T21:46:00.000-08:002007-11-25T22:25:01.908-08:00Domestic Bliss<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/754013/CharmaineFrost.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/754013/CharmaineFrost.jpg" border="0" alt="Charmaine Frost headshot" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Charmaine%20Frost">Charmaine Frost</a>
</p>
<p>
"Jeremy, where are you?" Laura shouted. She kicked a plastic toy truck into a stack of yellowed newspapers with edges as brittle and curled as dead leaves. One of these days, when she could find the vacuum and muster the energy and determination of a housecleaning superhero, she'd hurl the piles of junk out the door with a single swipe of mighty muscled arms. Cobwebs dangled from high corners like swatches of daintily stitched lace, but she'd mercilessly yank them down. She'd unleash the famished vacuum cleaner and let the ravenous machine devour the dust that covered her floors like thick, wild fur. "Jeremy Joshua, come out, come out, wherever you are!"
</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd0yzHPiRAonkePa6P07r8l-4Z2XOMks-HUZ4TcXDrbvdwkbMM4ntVu7qqD3TV7rirUIUjuldslU7gLUsYv7ntSQdq0Haoe__pU9_kXGNciOo65qClRg2JhpIQ5QQ5sTj-53jQL8v0dP8/s1600-h/First.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd0yzHPiRAonkePa6P07r8l-4Z2XOMks-HUZ4TcXDrbvdwkbMM4ntVu7qqD3TV7rirUIUjuldslU7gLUsYv7ntSQdq0Haoe__pU9_kXGNciOo65qClRg2JhpIQ5QQ5sTj-53jQL8v0dP8/s400/First.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5137030349503982610" /></a>
<p>
Laura would repeatedly misplace the vacuum cleaner. It was a thigh-high, round, orange contraption, shaped like a crashed UFO and with an attached hose long and wide enough to suck up a platoon of toy soldiers, a city of legos, a fleet of toy trucks and a four year old..
</p>
<p>
"Jeremy Joshua Ringdale Robinson the Third, come out here!” she commanded. The alien orange vacuum cleaner probably lurked some-where under mounds of old coupons, crusty cat food cans, torn envelopes and magazine articles that she might read sometime, in that nebulous future of unrationed time, perhaps in the nursing home when dead time would fill the space around her bed like a suffocating curse. Now, Jeremy could be crouching or sleeping anywhere, his head on a pillow of dented Styrofoam, his legs clamped under a lost shelving plank. "No more time in Trashville for you, young man! Jeremy Joshua, get out here now! "
</p>
<p>
Glass clanked musically; a dark beer bottle rolled from under a skein of multi-colored wires, stopping at the shiny amber oblong where spilled honey had made the rug permanently sticky. Jeremy toddled forward, holding up a dried banana peel and a withered tatter of bread from which dangled stringlike wisps of gray meat. In his other hand, he clutched a mummified orange.
</p>
<span id="fullpost">
<p>
Laura's upper lip curled slightly as she gingerly extracted the petrified turkey sandwich from her son, looked away as she dropped it in a green plastic bag, which probably held garbage, and wiped her fingertips on her shirttails.
</p>
<p>
"That’s not good for you," she muttered, her shoulders slumping as the boy wailed and darted away.
</p>
<p>
Her house shouldn't be like this, not when she was the eldest daughter of a man who'd worked for 30 years writing ads for Tidy Bowl. When I was in my prime, Laura recalled her father telling his golf buddies, then his coffee cronies, then any dog who'd listen, I worked 80 hours per week to come up with a jingle; back then, I had a mission, a place in society. When he died, his wife commissioned the stonecutter to carve a marble tombstone shaped like a giant toilet; now, dandelions grew, blazing and defiant, around the bowl and birds perched on the green travertine flusher. Sometimes, Laura wondered how many stray dogs had raised a hind leg to mark the giant toilet; she imagined the hordes of cemetery angels and cherubs stirring alive at night and rushing to the only graveyard potty, to relieve themselves after a day's long vigil.
</p>
<p>
Laura followed the cord from its wall outlet, fumbled where it tunneled under stained papers until she felt a hard lump, pulled out the telephone, and called her friend Mary.
</p>
<p>
"Hello Mary," she jabbered. "I’m living in a Filth Fiasco. Jeremy disappears every time I turn my back; Just when I’m about to call in a missing-person report, he stumbles out from the mess. I could be phoning the cops ten times a day – but then I tell myself that he’s nearby; I just can’t find him because I’m a slob.“
</p>
<p>
"Don't think of yourself as a slob," Mary interrupted soothingly. "Or a packrat.”
</p>
<p>
“I don’t know what he’ll hold or what’ll stick to him the next time he crawls out. Last time, he came out clutching a rotten sandwich – his trophy.” Laura sighed. “Or maybe there’s been a landslide. Jars and moldy cardboard bury him with one of the cats. But I don’t do anything for hours – because he’s always getting lost in one of those piles – and he suffocates when he could have been saved.” she moaned. “I wish I had a "Reset" button for the mess here! And with my background - if my father's a ghost, he probably avoids my house; even ghosts don't like to shudder in horror!"
</p>
<p>
At his funeral, the preacher had praised Father's life work, cleanliness being next to godliness and a wisk broom being the surest way of sweeping away the grime and clearing a path to heaven. Living in the service of cleanliness had earned him bonus points, coupons for discounted salvation, redeemable when he arrived at the pearly gates and got grilled by St. Peter. Right now, her father hovered somewhere in the pure blue stratosphere, his wings glistening white as new porcelain, his angel suit as perfectly pressed and immaculate as a new shower curtain. "Pour it in, swish and scour; your toilet smells fresh as a flower"; she could almost hear the tune, plucked on a harp string as he sang, the rough edges of his once gritty baritone sanded smooth and polished by a divine cleansing process.
</p>
<p>
Think of yourself as respecting the past, holding onto it because you cherish it,” Mary encouraged. “That's rare in our culture of throw-away things and throw-away people. So, think of yourself as uniquely gifted with an appreciation of things past. Your piles are the products of nostalgia and reverence."
</p>
<p>
"Like yours," Laura sighed. "But yours are artfully arranged; I don't even have room to shove my ugly clutter into closets."
</p>
<p>
"Not too much actual garbage here, " Mary laughed. "Just the prizes of my dump fetish. I'm going on a dump run tomorrow - itching to see what people have left on the side, in the 'claim me' section. Last week, I found a hairless, armless 1920s rag doll, in her original dress faded to palest sepia and ivory. The week before, I had to rescue a rippling metal sheet, covered with intricate patterns of rust, from the masher. And remember that Walt Whitman candy tin?"
</p>
<p>
Laura always enjoyed tours of Mary's found finery. She imagined Mary’s apartment converted into a museum of the uncollectible, with pretentious labels attached to each object and fake histories mounted on plaques beside each. Item One: Genuine rag doll, born October 3, 1922; hair lost during chemotherapy treatments at local doll hospital; arm fractured and amputated after spat with abusive husband, GI Joe, who suffered Post-traumatic-stress syndrome after return from war against the trolls. Item Two: A 1930s Art Deco metal candy box that once contained all the artistic ideas possible for the human race; when a child opened it, hoping to grab a chocolate, all the ideas flew out, atoms with wings that took to the sky and were swallowed accidentally by birds and flies.
</p>
<p>
"If I started to clean," Laura moaned, "I'd just uncover dishes of uneaten cat food, cubes of petrified beef clinging to the side, or maggots swarming festively in goop. Add the heady perfumes of paint thinner and ammonia when I knocked over half-shut bottles, and the grit of airborne sawdust from an old wood carving project."
</p>
<p>
"Sounds suitably atmospheric," Mary joked. "Even marketable as a perfume - the hottest thing out of France. Like the lichen footprints I found on my porch last spring, after I'd left socks scattered out there all winter. Tip-toe down the moss-way, I had a salable new fad, until the sun dried the path away."
</p>
<p>
Laura coughed, remembering the life-sized, hideously gaunt clay head that Mary had crafted in a sculpture class, then nestled in the fiberglass flooring of an apartment crawl space, a secret installation to shock the plumber or landlord who eventually opened that door.
</p>
<p>
"What I'm saying is - don't worry so much about the mess. At least you're not like Adam, who put one of those ancient mechanical typewriters on the roof to see if the rain might clean out the insides, then forgot about it for six months. When he remembered to fetch it, tree sap and bird shit had cemented it to the roof and he couldn't wedge it loose; he lives in the only house with a typewriter permanently next to the chimney." Mary paused. "You don't have a typewriter on your roof. Besides, if cleanliness is next to godliness, why is the world a mess and the universe ruled by chaos theory?"
</p>
<p>
Laura shrugged, hung up, and dialed her friend Frances.
</p>
<p>
"Your problem," Frances began slowly, "Is that no one helps you. Your husband lives there; he should do his share of cleaning. He may need prodding at first: Encourage and praise him, first for doing little things, then for larger tasks. Say 'I'm proud of you, you did a really good job'; reward him with morsels of ego-candy." Frances paused. "You know how Cora keeps her house spic-and-span? She lines up her kids, barks out orders like a drill sergeant, and doesn't let them go on leave until the place sparkles. Of course, being built like a Viking doesn't hurt her commander image."
</p>
<p>
Laura nodded, recalling Cora's black, furnace-hot eyes and warrior-broad shoulders. Even when she said and did nothing, Cora's personality filled a room like a force field, drawing some instantly like admirers to the queen while others retreated, pushed back by something invisible but overwhelming. Laura, who had to work at making herself heard and who often felt camouflaged by mists of invisibility, could never play warrior queen or drill sergeant. And she didn’t know how well her husband Ted, whose life motto seemed to be “I’m happy as long as no one bothers me”, would respond to prodding.
</p>
<p>
"But even a house-broken husband’s going to be better at some jobs than others," Frances continued. "My Richard was a class A vacuumer; he even removed the burner plates from the stove to vacuum it out! Lifted the dryer on wedges and vacuumed ten years of sludge from under it. I wondered if he liked jobs that made a visible clean path, or just liked hearing the rattles and whooshes of debris whizzing up the hose. So, I let the toilet bowl get dirtier and dirtier, figured that swipes of the brush would make a gratifyingly white, clean path in the brown. But, he never took to toilet cleaning. So, I decided that that he liked the clatters and clinks, the noise of machinery."
</p>
<p>
Laura lifted an old shopping list from where it had fallen near her feet, and squinted at the fading print on the torn yellowing paper; this list from the past could replace her current one.
</p>
<p>
"The husband should help," Laura agreed. "He makes half the mess. But, if he's going to help, he has to see that something's wrong. When Ted comes home from work, he doesn’t want any intrusions from the world; he wants to roll in a ball in his cozy shell and pretend nothing out there is real. Easier to ignore the mess than to do anything about it. He says he's an expert in selective obliviousness; he lies down on top of five books, a dog collar, yesterday's trousers, and a scattering of videocassettes, and he's asleep in two minutes. "
</p>
<p>
"Maybe you need to take lessons from him," Frances laughed.
</p>
<p>
Laura grunted, hung up, whispered a fortifying mantra, paused, muttered the mantra again, and dialed Cora.
</p>
<p>
"I know just the thing for you!" Cora boomed. "It's meant for people like you and it's brilliant, guaranteed to work! My sister, who never could keep her socks separate from her oranges, is with the program and raves about it; her house has changed from squatter-squalid to showplace clean in a month. Just call the Domestic Bliss people. If they're not in the phone book, they're in the newspaper - always advertising in the 'home and garden section. You do get the daily paper, don't you?"
</p>
<p>
Laura panted, catching her breath after so many loud, exclamatory words had battered her ears.
</p>
<p>
"Yes," she whispered, not admitting that she forgot where she had placed it. Jeremy dashed past her, paused before a mountain of papers, then dove in; envelopes, faded letters and old bills cascaded down, an avalanche filling the hollow made by his plunging body. Clutching the phone receiver in her left hand, Laura crawled into the heap, groping with her right hand until she felt cloth and flesh.
</p>
<p>
"Call them, they'll solve everything! They're the best," Cora exclaimed assertively, then shifted to a breezy tone. "It was great hearing from you. I'd love to talk longer but my call-waiting light's blinking. It's long distance, so I'd better get it. Love you!"
</p>
<p>
Cora clicked off; Laura dropped the receiver on the floor, listening to the dial tone and the faint giggles from within the trash heap as she tugged on her son’s arm.
</p>
<p>
“Jeremy,” She pleaded. “Come out of there. You don’t know what’s growing in there. Jeremy,” she paused “There are monsters growing in there. Mean, gooey monsters made from garbage, who like to eat little boys.”
</p>
<p>
Jeremy scurried out.
</p>
<p>
Laura sighed and mentally retraced her steps since entering the house with today's junk mail, spotted the newspaper beside the green garbage bag, flipped to the 'home and garden' section, scanned each page and read the ad, printed in bold crimson:
</p>
<p>
"Is domestic bliss forever beyond your reach? Are you overwhelmed by clutter? Disoriented by debris, dust and disorganization? Has grime infested your house like an evil, stubborn parasite? Has the broom become your enemy and tormentor, an invasion of guests your greatest fear? We know everything about your plight; we can solve all your home problems. Call Domestic Bliss Inc. for a free initial consultation. $25 weekly maintenance fee; lifetime guarantee on all services."
</p>
<p>
She nodded as she read the testimonials. For a 26 year old bank teller, dust bunnies had proliferated faster than real rabbits, until Domestic Bliss had intervened; Laura herself had sometimes wondered if household clutter had sex while people slept, with spring and fall being estrus season for newspapers and glass bottles doing the mating dance in summer. A 56-year-old biologist had lost her hamster for a month in a pile of debris; the animal finally had scuttled out, plump from a long feast on old lettuce and bread, stiff as plaster. A 42-year-old mother had decided to change her ways when her children repeatedly claimed to have lost their homework under a newly fallen avalanche of papers.
</p>
<p>
"Sorry, honey, I lost the kid," Laura muttered to the wall. "But don't worry, he's in the house somewhere. He can’t really be lost, he’s not far away. I’ll find him eventually – maybe in a year, maybe after he’s died from eating antique tuna sandwiches." She scribbled the Domestic Bliss hotline number in indelible marker on the back of her hand.
</p>
<p>
What's the first-born child of a Tidy Bowl expert doing, calling on others for domestic aid? she wondered, as she punched each button on the phone. But 'a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do', 'cleaning or dialing, it's all in a day's work', she thought as the succession of tones beeped in her ear; practical, tenacious, maybe she was her father's daughter after all. Maybe Father hadn't mail-ordered her from the local Adopt-a-Kid warehouse; maybe he hadn't rescued her from under one of the huge pumpkin leaves where reluctant mothers dropped their newborns. Maybe, in that neighborhood without a local cabbage patch, he hadn't found her on a park bench, sleeping in a cardboard box labeled "Take me, I'm yours".
</p>
<p>
"Domestic Bliss," a shrill voice squawked. "You break it, we re-make it; you spoil or soil it, we boil or --"
</p>
<p>
"My name's Laura Robinson. You take care of dirt emergencies, catastrophic filth?"
</p>
<p>
"Filth emergencies, that's our game; Domestic bliss, that's our name," the voice squealed. Laura wondered if the woman had been beamed down from a planet where people spoke only in rhyme.
</p>
<p>
"I mean real filth, a horrible, bad mess," Laura sputtered. "Clothes heaped so high, my son gets lost behind them.. Empty cans, plates crusted with food so old you could carbon-date it." Engineers had planned equally spaced houses on identical ruglike squares of lawn and had designed the streets to intersect at right angles in a perfect grid; Laura thought of her mess as a dark heart of chaos that threatened to expand and engulf the enclaves of perfect order and predictability.
</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwDcHZrE18fvagpEfnxQ09wrL82vsGlABXtjeDqZ6Q1R1qdkYFdbBnBCuMQT2t0qeHBt7OTujhQtVlaL2G1erAwAx7siQRmXOJn5NItZpXDOWJjZo93WVfS3iAUfP5T1pQIPh0xRzFxuA/s1600-h/Second.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwDcHZrE18fvagpEfnxQ09wrL82vsGlABXtjeDqZ6Q1R1qdkYFdbBnBCuMQT2t0qeHBt7OTujhQtVlaL2G1erAwAx7siQRmXOJn5NItZpXDOWJjZo93WVfS3iAUfP5T1pQIPh0xRzFxuA/s400/Second.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5137030353798949922" /></a>
<p>
"Magazine mountains, skyscrapers of paper, four-star Reek-o-ramas right in the heart of Cleansville, USA?” The voice paused. “Yes, we take on jobs like that all the time." Laura sank back in her chair on hearing the woman speak prose, but her stomach tightened as the voice accelerated to a shrill staccato, yapping com-mands. "We'll need your vital stats. The vital stats of your house. Your age. Married, single? Number of kids? Elderly depen-dents? Pets and how many? Your age. Their ages. House size. Number of rooms. Size of rooms --"
</p>
<p>
"Excuse me," Laura stammered, "Could you say that again? A little slower?"
</p>
<p>
The voice sighed theatrically and repeated its demands; Laura gave the information.
</p>
<p>
"We'll have an expert there at 10 Am tomorrow," the voice declared. "For a preliminary inspection, beginning restoration, and provisional rehabilitation plan. Be there at 10. We're never late."
</p>
<p>
A click ended the phone connection. Laura flipped through her day planner. Tomorrow, tomorrow... She could reschedule any appointments, claim an emergency; she wouldn’t be lying. Catastrophic clutter, devastation by dirt, grimly groping grime; act now, or be crushed in the avalanche. Anything to tame and cool the wild, hot, dark heart of chaos, anything to kill its passion for expanding, anything to crush that raving core to a safe, lifeless cinder. Anything to bring her living room closer to godliness, make her stairs fit for the climb to heaven, prove that she was her father's child and belonged.
</p>
<p>
<hr/>
</p>
<p>
The next morning, at exactly 10 o'clock, a glistening white van pulled into Laura's driveway. Side and rear doors rolled open; five workers in shiny silver suits leaped out, lifting and rolling equipment off the truck. Laura knew instantly that the suits were sterilized and disposable, incinerated after each job. In their reflective surfaces, the anemic overcast sky burned with feverish incandescence; the clothes were mirrors of the immaculate.
</p>
<p>
Behind them, a meticulously dressed woman parked a spotless white sedan and ambled towards the front porch where Laura waited.
</p>
<p>
“I’m Matilda, from Domestic Bliss, but you can call me Tilly.” The woman’s cheeks glowed ruddy as cherries and tiny ringlets covered her head in a neat golden halo. She shook Laura’s hand firmly with scrubbed, pink fingers and smiled as she rummaged through her white straw purse. “I’m here to explain a little about what Domestic Bliss does, introduce you to the process before our workmen get started.” She glanced conspiratorially towards the van, heaved her shoulders in a loud sigh and smiled apologetically; her teeth seemed whiter than the brightest showroom tiles and her pink suit as lint-free, perfectly fitting and uncreased as a new Easter outfit. “Unfortunately, some of our workers need lessons in etiquette. They’re well intentioned, committed to the cause and competent, but they can be a bit gruff. So, we ask you to excuse them if they sound mechanical or rushed.”
</p>
<p>
Matilda drew a rectangular package, wrapped in tin foil and stored in a vacuum-sealed clear bag, from her purse.
</p>
<p>
“The cause?” Laura asked, squinting at the men who scurried around the van.
</p>
<p>
“Cleanliness, good housekeeping,” Matilda murmured as she unzipped the transparent bag; Laura smelled the intoxicating aroma of chocolate. “But more than just good housekeeping. We believe in the betterment of individual lives, which leads to the betterment of society. Most of our workers are volunteers with a strong sense of community. That’s why we can offer our services so cheaply – only $300 for the initial cleaning - the House Revitalization step - plus follow-up inspections and periodic instructions to keep you on track. Domestic Bliss doesn't want you falling back into squalor; Domestic Bliss can't afford to let you backslide, your success is our success, the success of a community. We’re a non-profit organization; your success is our reward.”
</p>
<p>
She unwrapped the foil, revealing a tray of home-baked brownies; Laura sucked the fragrance deep into her lungs.
</p>
<p>
“Nowadays, there aren’t enough people who care,” Matilda continued, offering the tray to Laura. “These are for you and your son, little boys all love chocolate; I baked them myself this morning. Think of us at Domestic Bliss as the good neighbors you always secretly wanted – helping you in a time of need, welcoming you to your new, clean home with a little housewarming gift. I would have brought coffee too, but I don’t know you well enough yet to know what you drink in the morning.”
</p>
<p>
Laura took the tray, bit into a brownie and let the smooth sweetness cover her tongue like velvet. Matilda slid an efficient hand into her purse, pulled out a sheaf of spotless white papers, and handed these to Laura.
</p>
<p>
"The contract." She offered Laura a gleaming silver pen; Laura didn't see a scratch or smudge on its surface. “Really just a formality.”
</p>
<p>
Laura flipped through pages of miniscule print. The letters seemed to swarm over the paper like gnats; she wanted to blink and swat the illegible dots and dashes aside, wanted to clear the air. She’d need a microscope to read the words; they must have been written by a computer, by a mechanism with fine motor movements more precise than the human hand's and vision keener than the human eye's.
</p>
<p>
“I know,” Matilda smiled sweetly and shook her head. “Lawyers and their fine print. It'll take you hours to slog through all the jargon. Best that you just sign at the end, so that we can get on with business, and give the house back to you by 5 PM. Domestic Bliss Inc. guarantees the contract, until the death of either you or the company, whichever comes first." She stared directly into Laura’s eyes. “I have the same problem with contracts, all the legalese that no one can understand and print so small that only an ant can see it. But I can personally vouch for Domestic Bliss; would I be volunteering my time for something I didn’t believe in?”
</p>
<p>
Laura gripped the shiny silver pen, signed the contract in a larger, bolder script than she'd ever used and held her breath as she waited for the electric vibrations in her hollow chest to subside. “I’ve just signed on for a major life change,” she thought, “A truly clean house. And major changes are supposed to make you tremble a little, aren’t they?”
</p>
<p>
“Thank you,” Matilda said in a carefully modulated contralto and dropped the papers into a zip lock plastic bag. From her purse, she withdrew a container of disposable, sterile, moistened tissues. She pulled one through a tiny orifice, wiped the pen and her hands, and dropped it in a second plastic bag; she plucked out a second tissue and polished the pen until it glistened.
</p>
<p>
“The virtues of cleanliness,” she sang out, with a smile that momentarily seemed like a smirk. “You’ll learn to appreciate such virtues. And now, I’ll let the workers do their job; please excuse their manners.”
</p>
<p>
She strode briskly towards the white sedan as the foreman climbed the steps to the front porch.
</p>
<br/>
<p>
"Ma'am," the leader barked as Laura kicked a plastic truck with bulging red wheels away from the screen door, "We're the Domestic Bliss cleaning brigade." He displayed a badge bearing the company name in screaming red letters, the logo of a winged mop, and a tiny photo of himself; behind him, in unison, the other workers did the same. "Ma'am, do you have any animals or children in the house?"
</p>
<p>
Laura glanced at the front porch strewn with fat rubber balls, miniature plastic shovels, action figures that had lost the ability to grunt and stomp enemies into the concrete after their batteries had died, and stuffed toys resembling cartoon super-heroes. Why would these toys be scattered on the porch if she had no children?
</p>
<p>
“Do you have any botanicals?”
</p>
<p>
"Botanicals?”
</p>
<p>
"House plants, Ma'am. Flowers growing in mud, Bonsai trees, cacti in pots of sand. Roses made from silk, cloth daisies and vinyl leaves don't count. Fake plants always stay the same; they may gather dust but they don't die. So, strictly speaking, they aren't botanicals."
</p>
<p>
Laura sighed. "If I have any botanicals in here," she muttered, "I haven't seen them in months. They're buried under the piles; they've gone without sun and water so long, they're probably dead."
</p>
<p>
The worker blew out a long, loud breath. "That's good Ma'am, very good. Our job's easier if we don't have to worry about killing a forgotten botanical." He paused. "What about animal species?"
</p>
<p>
Laura glanced towards the living room, where a book thudded and papers rustled, like terrified birds fleeing an avalanche of magazines. The worker followed her gaze and winced.
</p>
<p>
"A dog, three cats and my son," Laura said.
</p>
<p>
"And yourself, you have to declare yourself," the worker asserted, solemn as a customs inspector. "You're human, and human beings are animals."
</p>
<p>
Laura craned her neck, following the magazines as they slid into dusty valleys; in the pale light, their glossy covers resembled puddles scattered among clumps of dying weeds. An orange and white tabby dashed through a doorway as her son leaped from behind a pile of dirty towels, underpants and jeans.
</p>
<p>
"You'll need to remove all these life forms from the house. Domestic Bliss Inc. usually recommends that you put them all in your car, and park that no closer than 30 yards from the property while we rehabilitate your home." Laura frowned as the man scowled towards the room behind her; the thin veins etching his temple and nose gave his coarse skin the blue overcast of cleanser; Matilda had been right to warn her about the workers’ gruff manners. "In cases like yours - in especially egregious cases of filth, and I can see that this house qualifies - a swish of the mop, a push of the vacuum cleaner, a sloshing of Lysol and a spritz of air freshener won't do. Cases like this require an eradication of rats, an evacuation of all the slumbering bats, a banishing of mold before it creeps up the walls and invades the ceiling --"
</p>
<p>
Laura shuddered as she imagined rats gnawing the dry wood and mold dissolving the moist timber, until only peeling wallpaper and flaking paint covered a skeleton of rot.
</p>
<p>
"In your case, we need to use every pesticide, bactericide, vermicide, herbicide and insecticide; every tetra-chloro- and dihydrobenzo- in the book. Who knows what evils lurk under a grimy rug?" As soon as Laura looked away, the man's face dissolved into a blur as featureless and lumpy as a bar of soap left too long in water. If she didn't concentrate on his words, his speech droned, like the whirring of a washing machine during the rinse cycle. "You have ten minutes to get the desirable life forms out of your house, " he announced, turning to Laura. "No longer. At Domestic Bliss, we start when we promise to start; we believe in speed and punctuality."
Laura nodded mutely as her stomach churned. Where was Jeremy? Could she catch the cats if she found them? Were the pet crates still in the basement, or lost under a mountain of magazines?
</p>
<p>
She turned into the house and screeched.
</p>
<p>
"Jeremy!" The call, too loud to be intelligible, made the windows rattle. The boy and the dog galloped forward, summoned by her alarm. The cats, awakened from limp-limbed naps, jumped over beds, scooted past jumbles of old computer parts, and pounced into the tiny bathroom. Laura found the pet carriers on a basement shelf, thanked a God she didn't believe in for the blessing, blew Lady Luck a kiss in gratitude, wondered how she'd pay for this new karmic debt, and promised the cosmos a sacrifice at some dawn in the distant future.
</p>
<p>
Laura left the house, pushing a cart stacked with a case of bottled water, a six-pack of Coke, a grab bag of high-cholesterol, high sugar, high-salt snacks, the tray of brownies, and three pet cages; in each, a cat wailed for release and scratched at the steel grating with long, desperate claws. Beside her, the two other desirable life forms trotted, one gripping her hand, the other tensing and relaxing his leash as he bounded forward and back. As she passed the crew from Domestic Bliss, each worker raised a silver-gloved right hand and waved.
</p>
<p>
"A messy house is the devil's workshop," one sang out as Laura's cart bumped over a riot of dandelions that had pushed between slabs of pavement concrete.
</p>
<p>
"Cobwebs are the devil's plaything," another added, and moved closer to the first "Sludge is the devil's clay, and grime is his coloring medium." A paint imported from hell, Laura thought, each speck of pigment is a tiny black hole. She imagined walls and doors of a blinding whiteness uninterrupted by fingerprints or spattered cooking grease, a house where no one moved because no one wanted to spoil the antiseptic perfection. The shining whiteness would burn through her retinas until she spun through a universe of screaming, condemning brilliance, unable to move or even blink; even a flickering eyelash might send eddies of invisible dust hurtling towards and into the walls, killing the perfection.
</p>
<p>
"That's why we believe in Total Educational Rectification," the third worker exclaimed. "A strict rehabilitation program for your home and for you; one can't hear a true sermon too often. But you already know that; you signed the contract." Any sane person knows that an unsightly home is the devil's handiwork. But Domestic Bliss is always here to help you; we stand by you for life."
</p>
<p>
Laura glanced uneasily down at her purse, into which she'd shoved a copy of the contract.
</p>
<p>
"An untidy house is the devil's playpen.,” she stammered back as Jeremy tugged at her arm. Best to recite the mantra; best to placate these workers who probably were chronically intoxicated from the fumes of industrial-strength solvents. Best to keep the dog, who poked his nose into smelly burrows and rolled in mud after every bath, far from the gleaming van. "A fall from order points to a fall from grace," she muttered to the fourth and fifth workers, who glared at her expectantly.
</p>
<p>
"My Dad's not just turning in his grave," she muttered to herself. "He's sitting upright, banging on the ceiling of his coffin, demanding to be let out so that he can dance a jig in his tattered Sunday best atop his toilet tombstone."
</p>
<p>
Jeremy clutched her hand more tightly; the dog huffed and twitched one floppy velvet ear.
</p>
<p>
"Your grandfather dedicated his life to cleanliness and orderliness," she explained, even though a three year old wouldn't understand the concepts; drifting into the slow cadence of a mother reading aloud, she felt calmed; stories and distant memories didn't threaten her so much. "Inside and outside, his house was a shrine to neatness and cleaning fluids. No one dared lean against the whitewashed picket fence and smudge it." The living room and dining room furniture had glowed, dust-free and a luminous golden-brown, like museum pieces. The reproduction Oriental rugs had spread out, magic carpets sprouting floral arabesques in a mythic realm scourged free of germs. The cut glass vases sparkled, miniature stars trapped in their facets; the silver and brass bowls reflected upside-down and distorted images of the room, fun-house mirrors that resulted from hours of buffing. Father had called the house "preacher ready", as spotless and godly as any human habitation could be. Laura would stand at the living room entrance, forbidden entry by her father and kept from entering as though a thick velvet cord blocked off the space. She'd kick off her shoes and socks outside the front door and walk barefoot across the burnished hardwood floors; shoes tracked in mud and leaves, heels could gouge and scratch perfection. She'd learned to routinely scrub her hands and confine her wayward hair in a net upon entering the house; human fingerprints marred the mirror-glossiness of a knob. The toilet water had been clean enough for a miniature man to swim in when his boat capsized or a cat to drink, but she'd been allowed no pets; gerbils spat pellets out of their cages and cats wouldn't submit to being shampooed three times daily.
</p>
<p>
"He spent his life writing jingles about toilet bowl cleaners," she mumbled to her son. "Creativity in the service of his god." Right now, Father wouldn't be dancing. He'd be standing on his tomb, as proud and tall as a skeleton could be, holding a bronzed bottle of cleaning fluid aloft like a trophy and shouting his manifesto for anyone above or below the tombstones to hear.
</p>
<p>
"Mommy." Jeremy fidgeted as Laura opened the back door of her car. "Are we going on a trip?
</p>
<p>
Laura pushed aside a faded bathing suit, an expired bottle of vitamins, a jar in which one Aspirin rattled and a paperback with mold festooning the edge of its damp cover, then set down the three cat crates. Forgotten shopping lists and stained receipts crackled softly, settling under the weight of the pet carriers; an unopened Christmas card from the plumber wafted down from the back seat. Laura knew that crushed pretzels, Hershey's kisses melted into slabs, a dried peach pit, wrappers streaked with solidified grease, raisins as hard as wrinkled pebbles and shriveled orange rinds had settled to the car floor. As the dog jumped onto the back seat, his speckled head almost touching the roof, an empty tin of cashews clattered across the seat into the door.
</p>
<p>
She rolled the back window down several inches; the dog wedged his nose in the opening, panting happily and eagerly inhaling the vapors from passing trucks.
</p>
<p>
"No trip," she replied as she lifted her son into the car and strapped him into the special child seat decorated with grape juice stains and grinning bears holding lollipops. "We just have to wait until those men are done fixing our house."
</p>
<p>
"The space men?"
</p>
<p>
Laura shook her head; as she trudged towards the passenger's side, the phrase "masked marauders" clanged in her mind.
</p>
<p>
At the house, two hooded workers wheeled a six-foot tall chrome vacuum cleaner towards the front door; behind it trailed a white bag as long as her living room; a flexible black tube, three feet wide and as long as her bedroom, protruded in front. The bag would expand into a bloated belly, holding and digesting the piles of dust, newspaper and garbage that her house could keep no longer but couldn't eliminate by itself. The corrugated tube, like a giant snout, would hungrily sniff and devour, sucking whatever it touched into the vacuum's famished maw. A child and a cat could easily be sucked into the bowels of the roaring monster until someone heard the screams, slashed the vinyl sides and plucked them from the churning innards of the evil beastie.
</p>
<p>
"If someone even could hear the screams," Laura thought, remembering the man whose mechanical voice had sounded like a computer simulation of human speech and wondering if such a huge machine would roar louder than a tiger genetically engineered to grow to elephant-size.
</p>
<p>
"Not space men," she muttered as she started the ignition and drove the car to a parking space down the block. "Just men in strange suits and hoods." Three of the workers wheeled giant chrome canisters towards the front door; even at this distance, Laura saw the skull and crossbones painted in stark black on the side of each. Enough poison to kill a nation of mice, a city of cats, a town of large dogs and many humans. Maybe they were space men posing as housecleaning specialists, eager to kill off humanity with their extraterrestrial concoctions and take over the planet.
</p>
<p>
"What are they doing in the house?"
</p>
<p>
"Cleaning it." A bread pan with brown crust peeling from the interior had slid forward; Laura kicked it back under the seat. What would the Domestic Bliss crew think if they saw her car? What would her father say? Last year, a wedge of cheese had rotted under the front passenger's seat until the car stank enough to challenge a fumigation squad. Laura had pawed through the mess for hours, stopping to re-read every letter and reminisce about every artifact in her roving house of memories, as she'd searched for the source of the smell. She'd joked that she was a survivalist, able to live for a month off the leftovers in her car; she hadn't even worn a mask, although she could have been dealing with a biohazard. "You live in a garbage receptacle," her father would have scolded, the disapproval smoking up from his wan lips and his ghostly mouth opening into a black hole of absolute scorn and despair.
</p>
<p>
"Can we go to McDonalds?" Jeremy clapped his hands and bounced in his seat until the car shuddered. Laura started the engine and drove into the street as Jeremy whooped, the dog barked and the three cats wailed for freedom.
</p>
<br/>
<p>
The Domestic Bliss crew had already left when Laura arrived home, her stomach bloated from three chocolate milkshakes and her ears ringing from childish shrieks and soprano caterwauls intermittently interrupted by basso barking. She glanced at the sign "Rehabilitated by Domestic Bliss Inc.; for emergencies, call..." glued firmly to a door that gleamed as white and glossy as one just released from the factory. Not wanting to mar the finish of the knob, brass that had been concealed for years by layers of grime, she wrapped her hand in her shirttail before opening it; polyester left fewer marks than skin.
</p>
<p>
"Be careful, take off your shoes before you go in," she whispered to her son as she gazed at the spotless walls and floors. She hadn't known that the living room carpet was green, had forgotten that she even owned a footstool. Only the architectural layout and the rooster-shaped wall clock, every number now legible through the glass, assured her that she'd returned to the right house.
</p>
<p>
"You'll have to stay outside," she told the dog as she hooked the leash to a garden pole. "At least until you get a bath."
</p>
<p>
"I should be pleased," she thought, "Now I can find things; now I won't lose my son. Cora will be pleased; she no longer has to admit to having a slob for a friend. My father would be pleased, is pleased if he's still around as a ghost." She glanced out at the twilit lawn, at the silhouettes of unruly hedges and the grass, crew cut in some places, as shaggy as a bum's beard in others. Thistle and dandelions rioted in purple and gold abandon where someone had once planted dahlias. She bent to pluck a square of paper from Jeremy's trousers - part of a faded old shopping list, residue from the car.
</p>
<p>
When her husband arrived home from the office, Laura stopped him at the front door, asked him to take off his shoes, and escorted him indoors.
</p>
<p>
"It looks good, doesn't it?", she beamed.
</p>
<p>
"Uh huh, very good," Ted mumbled through a mouth of potato chips, sank into the sofa as he did every night, and clicked the remote. Laura retreated quietly from the room; when Ted withdrew into his private inner world after a hard day at work, using the TV’s flickering light and humming voices to repel intruders, she knew not to interrupt him.
</p>
<p>
My family would be pleased," she mused while lying in bed. "Especially my father."
</p>
<p>
"Your father's dead," Ted grunted, and rolled in bed to face away from her.
</p>
<p>
"Sure, I know. But, remember how he always had the house spic and span, ready to impress the deacon. Even his car shone as though no one ever drove it, and his garden would have impressed the neatest landscaper?" Laura paused. "My car --"
</p>
<p>
Ted breathed deeply and rhythmically beside her. As she listened, she remembered how her father had painted the handles of his pruning shears glossy red each April, how he'd sharpened the blades until they gleamed and had scoured every speck of rust from his rake. A shiny green seal on the mower's aluminum casing certified that the engine had just had an annual tune-up and that the blades had been adjusted to exactly three inches above ground. His sickle and a machete had hung on stainless steel hooks above the garage worktable where he'd tidily lined up the best gardening books on the market as though diligent lawn care were a civic and religious duty.
</p>
<p>
"But he had a mental problem; he went to the extreme. A mind obsessed is a mind possessed," Laura told herself as the house's unfamiliar stillness folded around her like a suffocating blanket. She knew that worries could ossify into obsession, that fear and rigid compulsiveness could cause an insidious mental rot.
</p>
<p>
She listened for the crunch of paper under a scampering cat's paw, the clatter of a can dislodged by a large and clumsy dog, the thud of a magazine falling as Jeremy crept to the bathroom, all the comforting noises of life continuing in the dark. In the sterile silence on antiseptic sheets, she lay, too stiff to fall asleep, falling down, down, down in a dark mute void that led to a place that promised no solace.
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
Every other night for the next two weeks, at exactly 6 PM, a representative from Domestic Bliss knocked on Laura's door, entered before she had invited him in, and inspected the rooms. He ran his finger in parallel rows along each tabletop, examined the walls for fingerprints with a portable halogen lamp, and crawled across each rug, feeling for dust or grit lodged between the fibers.
</p>
<p>
"Dirt," he droned in his metallic monotone one evening, and held up a short white cat hair. "How many hours do you spend daily in domestic maintenance?"
</p>
<p>
"One," Laura mumbled into her collar.
</p>
<p>
"What?"
</p>
<p>
"One, but my son and my husband also do their bit," she muttered, hoping that exaggeration and little lies would placate the inspector.
</p>
<p>
"Not enough, a house this size needs at least 2 hours and 27 minutes daily for the upkeep of domestic bliss," he scolded and stomped out to the white van. Laura backed away as he wheeled in the giant chrome vacuum cleaner, cringed as the motor growled and gurgled like a hungry belly and the long tube sucked at her rug like the proboscis of a famished mutant insect.
</p>
<p>
"We'll be back again tomorrow," he said, after switching off the vacuum. "To begin Phase Two of your Educational Rectification. Domestic Bliss is with you now and forever; achieving domestic perfection can be a lifelong task, but we're by your side all the way. Cleanliness is our mission, our reason for being; all our workers are thoroughly devoted, we'd never desert you. Be here tomorrow at 3 PM."
</p>
<p>
The next afternoon, Laura spent two hours and 28 minutes, 60 seconds more than the prescribed minimum, on housework. At exactly 3 o'clock, a woman with sharply creased tan trousers rapped commandingly on the front door, displayed her badge and directed Laura onto the front porch.
</p>
<p>
"External domestics division, deputy director of the Delinquent vehicle Reform Squad" she rasped in a tinny, staccato voice. Her neck was broom-handle-thin and her skin as was a perfectly pressed white sheet. Laura frowned.
</p>
<p>
"We've seen your garage and what's kept inside it," the woman continued. "You don't drive a car; you drive a Trashmobile. A car should be a spotless transportation device, not a motorized garbage container. As we speak, a crew is towing your vehicle to our depot for fumigation, pest removal, debris eradication, grunge excision, and a 24 hour autoclaving."
</p>
<p>
Laura gasped. "But, I need my car. I go shopping, I take Jeremy to the playground." She started towards the road, but stopped abruptly as the truck towing her car disappeared over the hill. "And my husband uses it too. Besides, we didn't ask for all this; we only wanted house cleaning --"
</p>
<p>
"It's for your own good, the good of your household; achieving domestic bliss requires lifestyle overhaul. Your husband doesn't need a car; he uses the train. You can take public transportation too, and walk to the store. Walking tones the muscles - and your figure does need attention, but we don't need to focus on that yet" the woman asserted in a shrill monotone. "After the thorough cleansing, our team of electronics experts will install dust, fur, mold, food particulate and fetor sensors in your transportation device. You should clean your rehabilitated vehicle at least once weekly and avoid allowing furry life forms entry. Should you fail to maintain your cleaning protocol, should any designated particulates, mildew, digestible matter or foul odors be present, an alarm will sound here and in our home office, alerting us to the infraction."
</p>
<p>
The woman pulled a clipboard from her briefcase and decisively placed a check mark beside the second entry on a list that extended to the bottom of the page. Her gaze roved rhythmically back and forth like a searchlight, scrutinizing each of Laura's pores for a telltale blackhead and probing the yard for an incriminating dropped peach pit.
</p>
<p>
"When – ?" Laura began. Hearing her son whoop in front of the TV, she wondered how she'd tell Jeremy and her husband that the dog could no longer ride in the back seat beside the open window, his head bobbing and shaking happily as his tongue licked the wind. Already the dog, recently banished to the back yard, implored Laura with doleful brown eyes that accused her of sadism until she atoned by tossing him an extra bone; she felt like converting to Catholicism, just so that someone could absolve her of the accumulating guilt. "And Ted? What about when he goes fishing, throws the catch in a bucket in the back seat? And how can you expect a four year old to sit in a car for an hour with nothing to eat? I didn't ask for this! Why?"
</p>
<p>
The woman sighed loudly; to Laura, standing too close, her cool, odorless breath seemed too steady, like the streams emitted from a new air conditioner not yet personalized by rust stains from the owners leaky gutter or grape juice dripped from a child's cup.
</p>
<p>
"The car will be back tomorrow, fully sanitized," the woman said, then raised her right hand to her head. No strips of scratched-off polish on the pearly nails trimmed as perfectly oval as slabs cut by machines according to computer specifications. No torn cuticles, no scuffed knuckles, no fingertips calloused from years of gripping steel wool; who cleaned the home of this manicured woman? "And you did ask for this. Remember the contract? You signed on for lifetime management."
</p>
<p>
Laura gaped.
</p>
<p>
"Oh, and don't worry about your husband; he'll soon be too busy to think about fish. A man must contribute to Domestic Bliss; we just haven't gotten to his part yet. We start on that tomorrow, when we look at the condition of your lawn. Be here tomorrow at 8 AM. Have your husband beside you; it's a Saturday, we know he's off from work."
</p>
<p>
Watching the woman drive away, Laura shuddered. As she tiptoed down her spotless hall, she imagined driving to a hidden clearing, rolling down car windows smudged with taffy and road grime and burger grease, dumping buckets of mud on the back seat and letting buttercups grow there; she'd convert the Junkmobile to a Weedmobile, a Dreammobile, a tiny, roving, secret field of hope, where golden blooms could flourish unseen and revive her as the Domestic Bliss inspectors searched in vain for the car owned by an incorrigible slob.
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
"What's wrong with the lawn?" Ted asked over dinner. "It's green. Green is green, what more do you need in a lawn?"
</p>
<p>
Laura shrugged, wondering if she should just throw down Astroturf, then stick in clusters of silk irises and sunflowers. Some artificial flowers looked more real than the live ones and never wilted, never shed messy petals. Fake grass remained uniformly short, didn't let dandelions take root; a family could avoid mowing, seeding and digging, but maintain the perfectly barbered, weedless look that suggested domestic bliss to all.
</p>
<p>
"She mentioned the crabgrass and said the lawn was irregularly mowed, looked mangy in some areas and like it had a 5 o'clock shadow in others."
</p>
<p>
"Yeah, like I'm really going to waste every Saturday with fertilizer and pulling out weeds. Especially with a dog and a kid tearing up the ground." He stabbed his fork into a meatball and mashed it flat. "Who do these people think they are, anyway? Butting in everywhere, when we only asked for a housecleaning? They're beginning to sound like clones of your father."
</p>
<p>
Outside, a hedge trimmer buzzed. A few of the block's dedicated gardeners continued working after sunset, pulling weeds and pruning branches by the light of portable flood lamps; the sputtering engines and whining saws reminded Laura of her childhood with Father, spent being silent, stealthy and invisible.
</p>
<p>
"What's wrong with weeds?" she'd innocently asked her father. How could anything as cheerful as wild daisies, tiger lilies and buttercups be vile? What would happen if the rose suddenly grew wild, didn't need gardeners to reproduce, and took over lawns the way sumac and thistle did? What if roses defied human control by sprouting anywhere with weedlike abandon. Would we shout ‘This is great! Let the roses overrun my lawn; let the roses, in their new freedom, overrun the world!' Or would we add the rose to the list of forbidden plants? Even blacklist all the poetry and old gardening books that touted it as the paragon of beauty? "Would a rose be a weed if it could grow anywhere?"
</p>
<p>
Her father had whipped off his leather belt and held it, looped in his fist, over her head.
</p>
<p>
"You need an attitude adjustment, young lady," he'd roared. "Do you need the strap to teach you what's right? A rose can never be a weed; a rose is too beautiful to be a weed, a rose needs human cultivation too much. Weeds are rebellious, independent. They're like delinquent kids. Like scavengers. Like demons. Weeds flourish without love; they flourish on neglect. And where there is love, they suck it up like parasites. Weeds are the vampires of the soil. Weeds are always ugly; anything as beautiful as a rose could never be a weed, even if it comes with thorns. So, what have we learned about roses today? What should we have learned about roses a long time ago?"
</p>
<p>
Her gaze never moving from the belt, poised like a snake about to strike, Laura had stooped, trying to make herself smaller.
</p>
<p>
"A rose can never be a weed," she'd recited.
</p>
<p>
"Even if it has thorns?"
</p>
<p>
"Even if it has stabbing thorns," she replied. Thorns that impale the soul, thorns that draw blood like a vampire's teeth. "A rose can never be ugly, a rose can never be a weed," she'd stammered, while wishing that a particularly long and poisoned thorn would pierce her father's fist like an ice pick and promising the universe that she would never end up like her father if only she could learn the art of making herself too small and insignificant to attract the strap.
</p>
<p>
The sudden silence, after the last mower on the block had coughed to a stop, jolted Laura back to the present and her husband’s scowl.
</p>
<p>
"If they keep coming around, I might call the police," Ted fumed as Laura scraped uneaten food off three plates into a garbage bag. "Get them for trespassing, harassment."
</p>
<p>
Laura didn't mention the contract, not now. She jammed the forks and knives into their dishwasher compartments and imagined fleeing to a squalid trailer park under an assumed name. She'd dye her hair orange, wear rhinestone-studded sunglasses and clinging purple velveteen pants, learn to yack in a nasal twang, become the queen of the motor home motor mouths with an achey-breaky heart, a cliché past and a future as unpromising as a road of potholes. But she'd cringe whenever someone knocked on her rickety front door, fearing that one of Domestic Bliss's agents, with his electronically enhanced vision and long-distance telepathy, had targeted her location and uncovered the woman behind the costume. He'd cuff her, interrogate and lecture her, bring her back to this home of the immaculate, demand lifelong allegiance to the cause of cleanliness, demand her life.
</p>
<p>
"They came around here for one job," Ted complained. "Now they act like they own us."
</p>
<p>
Laura didn't pull out the contract; she didn't gather up her five magnifying glasses that, assembled in some particular order one atop the next, might perform optical magic and let her read the small print. She turned on the dishwasher and retired to her bed, where she lay watching slivers of light cut the dark ceiling like knives.
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
The next morning, a bright green van and a spotless white automobile pulled into the driveway. An unfamiliar man and woman, stern-faced and immaculately clad, marched to the front door. Ted, in a threadbare T-shirt and paint-spattered jeans, tried to block the entrance.
</p>
<p>
"Domestic Bliss, Sir," they intoned in unison, showed their badges, and pushed inside as though Ted were as lightweight as a fly. Ten figures clad in shiny green suits leaped from the van and swarmed around its rear; Laura heard the buzz of speech, then watched them uncoil the longest, fattest hose she'd ever seen.
</p>
<p>
"Martians!" Jeremy shrieked, tugging her hand as the man and woman returned from inspecting her house. "A monster snake! Can I touch it, can I?"
</p>
<p>
The woman scowled at Jeremy, put two check marks on a page in her clipboard and showed the document to the man, who nodded. Jeremy cringed away from the accusatory stare, gripped Laura's hand tightly and squeezed his body into hers.
</p>
<p>
"You can't....What right?" Crimson faced, Ted lurched towards the strangers but stumbled back, as though punched by an invisible force. "What gives you the right to go through our house," he stammered, dazed and desperately grasping for lost words. </p>
<p>
"What kinds of assholes invade someone else's yard like this?"
</p>
<p>
The woman frowned and solemnly checked another entry on her paper. Three of the workers pushed a machine, six feet high with a tapering chrome nozzle and a humped plastic back attached to a collapsed cloth bag. To Laura, it resembled a mutant, hungry anteater; as it fed on grass and worms and unlucky birds, the bag would expand like a slowly bloating stomach. Two others pulled a glossy chartreuse dome suspended above tiers of variably sized rotating blades, all dagger-sharp. Laura thought of an extraterrestrial stealth helicopter, with propellers for landing and spinning blades for decapitating any tree top or human in its way.
</p>
<p>
"We’re using our biggest machines on your lawn. More efficient that way,” the man explained. “Industrial strength equipment for an industrial-sized job.”
</p>
<p>
“Yours is obviously an end-stage case. A case requiring extreme measures, extreme labor, extreme dedication." The woman shook her head. "So many problems."
</p>
<p>
"Faults in all sectors, not a single area free of serious blemishes." The man shook his head in rhythm with the woman.
</p>
<p>
Several uniformed workers bustled around the van, holding shiny sickles, machetes and weed-whackers high above their heads; Laura thought of dancing tribesman, drunk before the sacrifice. The willow decked in its filigreed gown of tiny pale leaves, the pine attired in a gentle fuzz of green, the pert dandelions eagerly poking their golden heads above a ridge of grass seemed like offerings to be stripped or beheaded in deference to a newly victorious god.
</p>
<p>
"What do you mean, 'end stage case'?" Ted blustered.
</p>
<p>
Jeremy wedged his body between Laura's legs; she cupped her hands under his chin, a protective cocoon.
</p>
<p>
"Cleanliness is next to godliness," the woman intoned.
</p>
<p>
"Tidiness is next to godliness," the man added.
</p>
<p>
"And don't we all aspire to heaven?"
</p>
<p>
Laura, Ted and Jeremy stared at the two, unable to speak.
</p>
<p>
"That means clean, tidy housekeeping. Everything in its place and the right place for everything."
</p>
<p>
"That means neatly pruned bushes, perfectly rounded hedges. That means - no weeds, no fallen branches; permitting weeds is a form of sloppiness, like letting grime grow between your tiles. An untidy lawn is the devil's doing; fallen branches point to the fallen man."
</p>
<p>
"Our mission is to pull up the fallen man, restore him to perfect cleanliness," the woman droned. "It's our reason for being."
</p>
<p>
The two inspectors studied the paper on which the woman had jotted notes and put ominous checkmarks. Laura scowled; Jeremy, trying to wriggle free, pointed to giant gleaming hedge clippers that chopped away branches like the teeth of an insatiable scavenger. Workers squatted to dig invasive clover from between blades of approved bluegrass; they yanked out dandelions, scraped shelf fungi as small as fingernails from the trunk of a birch, and tossed the debris into gaping garbage bags as topsoil and flakes of tree bark rained over their impervious boots. On de-weeded areas of lawn, the huge mower growled ahead in undeviating straight lines, spitting out grass; behind it, the hump-backed machine snorted hungrily, sucked the clippings into its snout, and left a swatch of grass as short and uniform as a green rug. How would the Domestic Bliss inspectors have reacted if Laura had poured asphalt over the whole yard and painted it bright green? The attentive homeowner would maintain rows of soldierly tulips, rigidly erect beside shrubs as symmetrically domed as helmets and garden zones where geraniums mixed strategically with petunias in a watercolorist's wash of placating pinks and violets; on the ideal street, her lawn would merge with other lawns, all uniformly painted green. Today, the Domestic Bliss monitors came as lawn police; what role would they play tomorrow?
</p>
<p>
"Cleanliness means more than good housekeeping and lawn care," the woman intoned. "It means cleanliness of body and mind, clean speech and clean thoughts. He--" The female inspector glared at Ted. "He recently referred to a posterior excretory orifice by using a profanity; he likened us, dedicated delegates of Domestic Bliss, to that orifice."
</p>
<p>
"Wha-at?" Laura stammered.
</p>
<p>
"He called us 'assholes'," the man barked. "That is unclean speech, unclean thinking. The man obviously needs rehabilitation. His speech will need to be monitored and every breech of proper vocal protocol attended to."
</p>
<p>
Ted gaped.
</p>
<p>
"Tidiness means having the right things in the right places; that also refers to behavior," the woman continued in a slow falsetto as she frowned at Jeremy and tapped on her clipboard. "That means keeping the body where it's supposed to be, and only inserting words where they belong. Blurting out 'Martians' and fidgeting in the middle of a serious discussion are forms of disorderly conduct. The boy needs re-education; he already shows signs of pernicious untidiness at the core of his being."
</p>
<p>
Laura gasped.
</p>
<p>
"Think of your home as a tiny Eden in a fallen world." The man's voice whirred like a motor. "Remember that this Eden, every day and in every way, can only get better and better."
</p>
<p>
Ted snorted, arms crossed over his chest. The woman inspector scrutinized her checklist and nodded solemnly.
</p>
<p>
"The adult male's vocal indiscretions and the behavior of the home's minor member are hardly surprising," the woman droned. "Analysis of our observations shows an urgent need for Interior Aesthetic Adjustments and Sartorial Re-alignment."
</p>
<p>
Laura’s jaw dropped.
</p>
<p>
"Re-decorating. Different colors, different fabrics," the inspector clarified. "And an overhaul of how you approach the task of dressing yourselves."
</p>
<p>
Laura, gripping Jeremy's shoulders, noticed the mud spatters on his socks, the sneakers faded to an indifferent gray-blue by so much wading through puddles, the bur sticking to the back collar of his rumpled shirt.
</p>
<p>
"But, what's wrong with our house?" she sputtered. "It's bright and cheerful. And Jeremy's not even in school yet. Why should I worry about whether his outfit matches or his shoes get stained? He liked playing in the woods, and the rabbits don't care what he looks like."
</p>
<p>
The female inspector inhaled deeply and briefly shut her eyes, as though willing forth the patience to explain the obvious to the incorrigibly ignorant.
</p>
<p>
"That's not the point. Whether you like your house doesn't matter." She signed loudly and pointed to the yard. "You have rows of forsythia bushes - fortunately not in bloom. You've also fallen for the daffodil and marigold craze. And your lawn's a breeding ground for buttercups and dandelions. Up to me, I'd outlaw yellow flowers, after scientists proved the neuroexcitatory effects of some colors." The inspector narrowed her eyes. "You do remember those studies, don't you?"
</p>
<p>
Laura nodded, confused but reluctant to encourage a lecture, perplexed as she recalled blazing forsythias lining the streets in early spring, the first explosion of cheeriness after a gray winter.
</p>
<p>
"Yellow doesn't stop with one buttercup," the inspector asserted. "Yellow expands to a field,"
</p>
<p>
Laura nodded automatically, as she'd often done before her ranting father. Laura knew what he'd said about orange, what this lady would say about yellow. Yellow was the color of warning signs and dandelions. Yellow screeched, flashed, set off every howling siren in the mind, made the heart race, jolted the muscles into tense alertness. Yellow spread beyond the forsythia bush; yellow became an epidemic of glowing dandelions, a field of fire and too much light. Too much razzle-dazzle, which excited and irritated the mind; too much razzle-dazzle was bad. Razzle-dazzle-yellow is the devil's plaything; we must let no yellow in our yards.
</p>
<p>
"Your son's bedroom is bright yellow," the inspector scolded. "How can you expect orderly conduct from a nervous system exposed to so much yellow? Your kitchen and bathroom are yellow. How can you expect a husband to speak properly when his brain sparks sizzling, helter-skelter currents and short-circuits from a toxic overdose of yellow? The decor must be converted if the man and boy are to be converted."
</p>
<p>
Laura and Ted stared blankly, speechless.
</p>
<p>
"Blue soothes, pink pacifies," the male inspector recited in a nasal monotone. "The trinity of blue, lavender and pink is the trinity of tranquility. Harmonious colors lead to a harmonious society; community peace grows out of the colors of peace. The home must be a peaceful place."
</p>
<p>
Laura cringed and glanced imploringly at her husband. Ted stared fixedly ahead, his jaw clamped shut, an artery on the side of his neck throbbing to the beat of a primordial war dance. The female inspector gazed smugly at the clipped, pruned yard, sucked clean of a decade's infiltrating detritus, of the rot that had seeped in and spread under the eyes of the indifferent and unvigilant. She tapped her clipboard, commanding attention with the staccato raps.
</p>
<p>
"With all our devoted workers, we can attend to sartorial re-alignments and adjustment of the interior aesthetics simultaneously," the woman yipped, as though Laura should feel overjoyed by the news. "You'll get verbal lessons along the way, but you'll learn most from doing and experiencing; we've found that habit-replacement leads to faster and longer rehabilitation than does mere talk. The wrinkled, stained, torn, faded and patched clothes must go - too messy for safety. The mind copies what the mind sees."
</p>
<p>
A crimson blaze had surged over Ted's face; his eyes burned darkly hot, like coals ready to be stoked to fire by any comment.
</p>
<p>
"The state of the mind mirrors the state of the body," the male inspector added. "Messy attire encourages messy thinking; a clean mind grows only in a clean body. We'll also have to monitor how often he bathes."
</p>
<p>
"And whether he washes behind his ears."
</p>
<p>
"Keeps his fingernails short but scrubs them anyway."
</p>
<p>
"Scours between his toes. An often forgotten place in the bathing ritual, a frequent entry point for infiltrating impurities."
</p>
<p>
"Monitor the adult bathroom rituals as well. Plus their weights and the flabbiness of the musculature." The inspector scrutinized Laura and Ted, and shook his head. "A definite need for Appearance Rectification - trainers at the home daily for work-outs, weekly measurements of biceps thickness, fat to muscle ratio, body mass index. A slovenly body engenders a slovenly spirit."
</p>
<p>
Laura bit down to control the quivering in her lower lip and gripped a wad of abdominal fat between her thumb and index finger. "A non-detachable floatation device around my middle," she thought, "Meant to keep me afloat as the whitewater currents of life send me crashing into rocks." This life preserver wouldn't keep her buoyant though; even among the neighborhood ladies, far less demanding than the Domestic Bliss delegates, revealing this blubber could send her sinking towards the sludge at the bottom of the social pool. Ordinary people, as well as the purified, demanded bodies stripped clean of fat.
</p>
<p>
"We know this is hard for you. So much to do, so much to change," the woman continued. "We're not without compassion. That's why we're assigning you personal guides, who will be with you most of the day to watch your progress and correct your ways."
</p>
<p>
"Prison guards," Ted grunted, and pounded his fist against his palm; the inspectors ignored him.
</p>
<p>
"We'd like to mentor you with a totally person touch, have your guide with you 24 hours per day for face-to-face, up-close-and-personal teaching. Unfortunately, we can't do that. Our workers also need to sleep and be with their families; they're dedicated to the mission, but sleep and kin contacts are vital to domestic bliss. So, to save our devoted guides from perditions, we've made other arrangements to accommodate your needs in their absence --"
</p>
<p>
"Like a frontal lobotomy? That'll do the trick," Ted spat out, rocking up and down on his toes and repeatedly hitting his palm with his fist. "Implant electrodes. Then we'd run to let you throw the collars around our neck, and follow behind you on the leash. Lobotomy, that's the way to go; we'd even jump in the river on command."
</p>
<p>
The woman turned to Ted with her plastic, mannequin smile and continued. "We've installed electronic monitors strategically through your home so that someone can hear you even when no actual person's available. Our Embedded Ear program, it lets us catch slip-ups before they fester into dangerous habits. Even when none of our representatives is with you in person, our electronic monitors will let you know when you’ve done wrong; you’ll get the message loud and clear. No escaping our dedicated surveillance; we want you to learn your lesson."
</p>
<p>
The inspector tried to widen her glossy painted smile into something seemingly benevolent and patient, humane but without human imperfections. She added a dash of falsetto sweetness to her voice, but too late. Ted stormed towards her, his face aflame, his body lunging, his arms reaching for the woman's neck, ready to shake and throttle her. She flailed her arms to block an attack, stammered "No....Don't....You...." in a breathless raspy whisper, and stumbled backward until stopped by the porch railing. Suddenly, Ted stopped, looked at the people who were watching him and at the neighboring houses where invisible witnesses might hide behind unlit windows. He lowered his hands.
</p>
<p>
"What kind of shit is this? What are you nuts, you assholes - yes, assholes – trying to pull?" he bellowed.
</p>
<p>
The male inspector started back, as though blasted by breath stinking of brimstone. The female cautiously edged towards her colleague.
</p>
<p>
"You cleaned our house well; we paid your fee," Ted thundered. "But what the hell gives you the right to stomp all over our lawn, prowl through our house every day, redecorate our rooms, re-parent our kid, correct our speech? What kind of crap is this?"
</p>
<p>
The woman loosened a sheaf of papers from her clipboard and offered them to Ted.
</p>
<p>
"Yeah, so what's this?" he snarled.
</p>
<p>
"The contract," the woman replied in an even-paced monotone. "That your wife signed." She paused, then spoke more slowly. "Our complete service contract"
</p>
<p>
Ted whirled towards Laura, his right eyelid twitching on his crimson face, his blocky chest and shoulders set rigidly forward. "You signed a contract with these people? A contract?" He swung his fist up, beat the air and started to pace. "Allowing them to meddle in our lives, to own us? What kind of woman did I marry? Couldn't you tell they were nut cases?"
</p>
<p>
Ted kicked the doorjamb, then marched to the female inspector and snatched the document from her hand. Laura shrank back as Ted began to read, staring at her feet and clutching the porch railing for support.
</p>
<p>
"It was all so tiny," she whimpered. "Hardly visible, almost as small as bacteria. A blur. The words, I mean; they weren’t big, like what you’re reading now. The part about the initial housecleaning was clear, big and bold letters. But then, a lot of fuzz. A lot of the print looked like dots, mites in the cat's ear, a page of smudge. I'd have needed a microscope to read it. If it was writing, that is. Jeremy's not old enough to have a microscope. They were already here and all set up - to do the house cleaning. And the first lady, the one who had me sign, seemed so nice, like a friendly neighbor; she even gave Jeremy a brownie. You know how often we lost Jeremy behind all those piles, a housekeeping emergency. The lady said that the small print was a lot of legalese, ‘wherefore’s and ‘whatnot’s that just promised us a thoroughly cleaned house. We wouldn’t have to lose Jeremy any more; I couldn’t have found a microscope even if Jeremy had one --"
</p>
<p>
"Enough!" Ted roared, the pages shaking in his fists as he glared at the print.
</p>
<p>
Like mites in a cat's ear, Laura thought. Now the cats' ears are clean in a disinfected house. Now a new kind of pest invades. Our front door's an orifice, letting in the missionary mites from Domestic Bliss to feed on our lives, to grow and multiply in our home until they've sucked it dry of spirit....And I'm as good as a mite, I let them in; I didn't question the mite-sized print. I should be squashed like a mite, sprayed with pesticide, swept from a world that might be ideal without my kind nibbling at its polished surface, turning the planet into an irritable itchy boil.
</p>
<p>
"It's all spelled out on those pages," the woman inspector said. "Big and bold, loud and clear, in black and white. Ours is a program of progressive edification, rehabilitation at all levels. A messy home is only a sign of dangerous chaos breeding at the core; achieving domestic bliss requires purification of the entire organism."
</p>
<p>
Ted crushed the papers in his fist, shoved the crumpled wad in his pocket, then jerked it out; the meaning of the words on his copy of the contract, all in 14 point boldface, was clear.
</p>
<p>
"Purification is a full-time job for us and for you; luckily, we're dedicated." The woman turned her lips up in a thin, practiced smile beneath stony eyes. "Think of us as giving the home a long needed enema; we wash away the toxins."
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
Late that night, after the monitors had finally departed, Ted opened the refrigerator door, pawed through the contents, muttered something under his breath, and shut the door.
</p>
<p>
"Nothing in there," he grumbled, and kicked the base of the dishwasher. "Can't a man even eat what he wants?" A cheeseburger after a trying day, Laura added silently; can't a man indulge in a bun drenched in grease, in medium-rare sirloin dripping juice, in a cold beer to lower the temperature of his anger?
</p>
<p>
Domestic Bliss had removed the six-pack of Guinness stout, Ted's favorite. They'd replaced the marbled red meats with tofu and skim milk; they'd tossed out Jeremy's Oreo cookies, the day-old chocolate donuts, the caramel-coated popcorn, the corn chips and the ice cream, replacing these with onions, carrots, brussel sprouts and enough spinach to feed a city of bulimic rabbits. Laura's stomach gurgled as she imagined scoops of chocolate-marshmallow ice cream in a bowl, the hard, frost-glazed spheres melting into shiny lumps of goodness.
</p>
<p>
"I could go for some ice-cream myself," she mumbled, keeping her eyes averted from Ted, fixing her gaze on the ovals of light reflected off the buffed floor.
</p>
<p>
The mowers had stopped snarling, belching and spitting; the hedge trimmers had stopped hissing and screeching; the weed whacker had stopped shrieking. Even the refrigerator seemed asleep, napping between periods of low groaning and rumbling. Laura shivered in the silence. From the town dump, the thousand papers that once cluttered these rooms mutely begged to be resurrected from their ignominy; hundreds of discarded letters and cards, bearing forgotten names, vowed revenge from the pit of anonymity.
</p>
<p>
Ted banged his fist against the refrigerator door.
</p>
<p>
"Tofu! That's not a meal, that's wet cardboard on a plate." He slammed his arm against a cabinet; the hinges creaked in protest as he spun towards Laura. "The fine print, Laura, didn't anyone teach you to read the fine print? If it's too small, don't sign. Why the hell didn’t –“
</p>
<p>
A metallic clanking reverberated through the house as steel bars dropped over each window. A siren blared from somewhere in the wall. As Ted cringed, hands over ears, Laura rushed to the back door, turned the knob and pushed; the door stayed closed. She pulled the handle and rammed her body against the wood paneling.
</p>
<p>
“Locked, we’re locked in,” she gasped when silence finally came.
</p>
<p>
Jeremy stumbled into the kitchen in his pajamas, clutching his head and wailing.
</p>
<p>
“The indoor alarms!” Laura blubbered. “Didn’t they say something about ‘embedded ears’? Being able to hear us, even when no one’s here in person? About ‘no escaping’, using alarms to set us right?”
</p>
<p>
Ted yanked open a closet door, snatching a hammer, drill and handsaw.
</p>
<p>
“Indoor monitors? Alarms in the wall, you say? I’ll find them all, even if I have to drill through every inch of these walls. Pull them out, pound them to smithereens. Even if I have to smash half the house, I’ll show them what they can do with their damned monitors! I’ve had enough of their shi—“
</p>
<p>
The sirens screamed in ever room, louder and shriller than before. Laura, Ted and Jeremy collapsed to the floor, hands clamped over ears. The screams drilled through their skulls, blasted through their hands, beat through their skin and muscles. The walls shuddered; the windows rattled; the overhead light flickered, mockingly in rhythm with their pulses and vibrating bones. Laura, Ted and Jeremy crouched, waiting for an end but locked in an eternal present of unending screams; they crouched as the moon drifted nonchalantly above lingering clouds, as constellations set, as a scarlet dawn seeped into the eastern sky and the neighbors awoke to another turn at breakfast, bus schedules and business.
</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBpDaaDBfMm6yYGQcv1_dNry9c6B0ckRR60U9xnDDRgjLIPDcIhx4ZeVo4K136251RuW7qlKIs_9VGi9Qw7EtNTu4XsJ1pE2DehgAPnqdSnfF6fdCxB3GEUvlAEXLOdP3ZFEgS8NbjCLY/s1600-h/Third.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBpDaaDBfMm6yYGQcv1_dNry9c6B0ckRR60U9xnDDRgjLIPDcIhx4ZeVo4K136251RuW7qlKIs_9VGi9Qw7EtNTu4XsJ1pE2DehgAPnqdSnfF6fdCxB3GEUvlAEXLOdP3ZFEgS8NbjCLY/s400/Third.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5137030362388884530" /></a>
</span>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-53863225236398133342007-11-15T17:00:00.000-08:002007-11-15T17:03:10.539-08:00Outsmarting Your Ass<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCVK-Xf6ntkt10tRJqT0yn_Nz4SgKSICqT6XZm6KwzpXPSfC-YF_X80IyhsYzk-jp9jsq4XuizSiIo9oamA_nNWYSN1A4c3dZUh69BcWLiBIrDZHZklEdHCBbY5kHxDrdoi9oU3q4o6Zc/s1600-h/FrankLuger.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class=author src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCVK-Xf6ntkt10tRJqT0yn_Nz4SgKSICqT6XZm6KwzpXPSfC-YF_X80IyhsYzk-jp9jsq4XuizSiIo9oamA_nNWYSN1A4c3dZUh69BcWLiBIrDZHZklEdHCBbY5kHxDrdoi9oU3q4o6Zc/s200/FrankLuger.jpg" border="0" alt="Frank Luger headshot" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054489223893870818" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Frank%20Luger">Frank Luger</a>
</p>
<p>
The salt merchant’s ass was so laden and so thirsty that jumping into the river became inevitable. Behold! Thirst quenched and burden much eased. Alas, such repeated smartness spoiled enough merchandise to bring lash and curse - uselessly. Then, wisdom saw the ass laden with enough sponge to match the usual weight. Animal intelligence or not, this is how Man outsmarted... his ass.
</p>
<p>
Although anecdotal, the story is true. The wise merchant was none other than Thales (cca. 624-548 B.C.E.), the first great thinker in ancient Greece. Regrettably, the storyteller Plutarch fails to mention who the ass was.
</p>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-52957479523370282802007-11-14T09:48:00.001-08:002007-11-14T10:25:57.601-08:00The Haibun<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/619519/Maria.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/619519/Maria.jpg" border="0" alt="Maria Claudia Faverio headshot" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Maria%20Claudia%20Faverio">Maria Claudia Faverio</a>
</p>
<p>
According to the Haiku Society of America (HAS), “A <em>haibun</em> is a terse, relatively short prose poem in the <em>haikai</em> style, usually including both lightly humorous and more serious elements. A <em>haibun</em> usually ends with a <em>haiku</em>. Most <em>haibun</em> range from well under 100 words to 200 or 300. Some longer <em>haibun</em> may contain a few <em>haiku</em> interspersed between sections of prose. In <em>haibun</em> the connections between the prose and any included <em>haiku</em> may not be immediately obvious, or the <em>haiku</em> may deepen the tone, or take the work in a new direction, recasting the meaning of the foregoing prose, much as a stanza in a linked-verse poem revises the meaning of the previous verse.”
</p>
<p>
Japanese haibun apparently developed from brief prefatory notes occasionally written to introduce individual haiku, but soon grew into a distinct genre. The word haibun is sometimes applied to longer works, such as the memoirs, diaries, or travel writings of haiku poets, though technically they are parts of the separate and much older genres of journal and travel literature (nikki and kikôbun). [From the <a href="http://www.hsa-haiku.org/archives/HSA_Definitions_2004.html">HSA Definitions Web site</a>]
</p>
<p>
As we can see, the haibun is a combination of prose and haiku, a “narrative of epiphany”, as Bruce Ross called it.
</p>
<p>
It was introduced by the haiku master Basho in 1690 in a letter to a friend, that concluded with a haiku (<a href="http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Island/5022/hut.html">“Genjuan no ki”, “The Hut of the Phantom Dwelling”</a>).
</p>
<p>
Makoda Ueda names the following characteristics of the haibun:
<ol>
<li>the brevity and conciseness of <em>haiku</em>, in which each word carries rich layers of meaning;
</li>
<li>a deliberately ambiguous use of certain particles and verb forms in places where the conjunction 'and' would be used in English;
</li>
<li>a dependence on striking imagery;
</li>
<li>the writer's detachment.
</ol>
</p>
<p>
In the tradition of haiku (Basho himself spoke of “haikai no bunsho”, “writing in the style of haiku”), the present tense is used to convey a stream of sensory impressions as well as the feeling of universality and timelessness, at the same time eschewing abstractions and conceptualizations. Everyday experiences are given universal values, as in the haiku, allowing access to divine revelations, hence the epithet “narrative of epiphany”.
</p>
<p>
The haiku that accompany the prose can be of two types: haiku summarizing the prose (juxtapositions), and haiku that are not connected to the prose but rather add to it. The transition occurs in renku style. The prose itself shouldn’t be too prosaic or sentimental. Together, they provide a unified poetic expression. It is difficult to determine which comes first, as they are both of equal importance and form a unity, almost like yin and yang.
</p>
<p>
A wide variety of subjects is acceptable, from nature to travels, diary, dreams, love, death, etc. Haibun can also be written in a wide variety of styles, from the bombastic style of William M. Ramsey in his “Prayer for the Soul of a Mare” to Sally Secor’s simple, colloquial style in “A Garden Bouquet”.
</p>
<p>
Haibun are now written in all countries and in all languages, like haiku, but the USA is the country that has most experimented with the form. Bruce Ross's “Journey to the Interior: American Versions of Haibun”, published in 1998, gives deep insight into American haibun.
</p>
<p>
One of the best known haibun in English is Vincent Trippi's “Haiku Pond: A trace of the trail... and Thoreau” (1987), a meditation on <em>Walden</em>.
</p>
<p>
To conclude, a classical example from Basho’s “Narrow Road to the Deep North”, the “Departure”:
<blockquote>
It was early on the morning of March the twenty-seventh that I took to the road. There was darkness lingering in the sky, and the moon was still visible, though gradually thinning away. The faint shadow of Mount Fuji and the cherry blossoms of Ueno and Yanaka were bidding me a last farewell. My friends had got together the night before, and they all came with me on the boat to keep me company for the first few miles. When we got off the boat at Senju, however, the thought of three thousand miles before me suddenly filled my heart, and neither the houses of the town nor the faces of my friends could be seen by my tearful eyes except as a vision.
<blockquote style="text-align: center;">
<em>The passing spring<br/>
Birds mourn,<br/>
Fishes weep<br/>
With tearful eyes.
</em></blockquote>
With this poem to commemorate my departure, I walked forth on my journey, but lingering thoughts made my steps heavy. My friends stood in a line and waved good-bye as long as they could see my back.
</blockquote>
</p>
<h2>
References:
</h2>
<a href="http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~kohl/basho/index.html">http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~kohl/basho/index.html</a><br/>
<a href="http://www.raysweb.net/haibun">http://www.raysweb.net/haibun</a><br/>
<a href="http://www.worldhaikureview.org/">http://www.worldhaikureview.org/</a>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-11425017882068343802007-11-07T15:50:00.000-08:002007-11-07T15:55:09.131-08:00Survival<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoRj3VAVtDl84kPNU6gmFZ9Ls1IPzRH4O-Jh3VpIyKsYJKXuX8_tYeflfbkp-zH5ZjRdti6yWBno6J4xmOAPMHEsTyBRB2oSmDRVN0TY9171FJr5qR9os67Agkpq6so7VXkpwHCkG2HQk/s1600-h/Jolanda+Dubbeldam.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoRj3VAVtDl84kPNU6gmFZ9Ls1IPzRH4O-Jh3VpIyKsYJKXuX8_tYeflfbkp-zH5ZjRdti6yWBno6J4xmOAPMHEsTyBRB2oSmDRVN0TY9171FJr5qR9os67Agkpq6so7VXkpwHCkG2HQk/s200/Jolanda+Dubbeldam.JPG" border="0" alt="Jolanda Dubbeldam" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5078949455521828658" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Jolanda%20Dubbeldam">Jolanda Dubbeldam</a>
</p>
<p>
Tropical heat violently beats my head<br/>
bouncing up from white crust<br/>
underneath my feet.<br/>
Eyes clenched behind sunglasses<br/>
not good enough protection<br/>
not helping stem streams of sweat<br/>
stinging eyes and skin.
</p>
<p>
I sink slowly to crouch<br/>
reach fingers to touch<br/>
tiny white grains attach<br/>
I bring them to my lips<br/>
Salt. Salt of the earth.
</p>
<p>
Later, when heat dissipates<br/>
sun’s fierce heat cools to orange<br/>
fellow visitors arrive <br/>
to crouch and lap with tongues<br/>
smooth or rough.<br/>
Peace will reign a while as<br/>
lion shares space with gazelle.
</p>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-56514217132446564442007-11-06T21:44:00.000-08:002007-11-06T21:46:30.526-08:00Outsourcing the Messiah and the Gray Nanobot Slime<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/200/80614/Richard%20May%20for%20RandR.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/200/80614/Richard%20May%20for%20RandR.jpg" border="0" alt="Richard May headshot" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Richard%20May">Richard May</a>
</p>
<p>
The God of the Bible is more-than-a-little like an<br/>
American Republican. Consequently the redemptive role<br/>
of the Messiah was outsourced to reduce expenditures<br/>
in the last quarter of some ancient year. The stand-in Messiah<br/>
came near the end of the first century C.E. But no one<br/>
even noticed Her. She also said that the Kingdom is here and now.<br/>
Again, no one had "ears to hear."
</p>
<p>
Men didn't even bother to crucify Her. They were<br/>
busy getting ahead and it wouldn't have been cost effective anyway,<br/>
with the high price of wood. The entire Age of Universal World Peace,<br/>
which She would have ushered in, was reduced to a commercial break<br/>
followed by ten seconds of silence.
</p>
<p>
Now humanity, itself, is being outsourced in a move to increase<br/>
productivity. What had been our job of gathering up sparks<br/>
of the Divine, creating souls and repairing the world<br/>
has been re-assigned to a sea of nanobots, which presumably will work on<br/>
this task far more harmoniously and efficiently.<br/>
Finally humankind will be replaced - by gray nanobot slime.<br/>
</p>
<p>
May-Tzu
</p>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-24002561474266227102007-11-01T17:54:00.000-07:002007-11-01T17:59:37.919-07:00Reflections on my Family, the Home-Cooked Meal, and the Joy of French Fries<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoRj3VAVtDl84kPNU6gmFZ9Ls1IPzRH4O-Jh3VpIyKsYJKXuX8_tYeflfbkp-zH5ZjRdti6yWBno6J4xmOAPMHEsTyBRB2oSmDRVN0TY9171FJr5qR9os67Agkpq6so7VXkpwHCkG2HQk/s1600-h/Jolanda+Dubbeldam.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoRj3VAVtDl84kPNU6gmFZ9Ls1IPzRH4O-Jh3VpIyKsYJKXuX8_tYeflfbkp-zH5ZjRdti6yWBno6J4xmOAPMHEsTyBRB2oSmDRVN0TY9171FJr5qR9os67Agkpq6so7VXkpwHCkG2HQk/s200/Jolanda+Dubbeldam.JPG" border="0" alt="Jolanda Dubbeldam" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5078949455521828658" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Jolanda%20Dubbeldam">Jolanda Dubbeldam</a>
</p>
<p>
I was leafing through a magazine the other day, looking for the recipe that had caught my eye on its cover. It turned out to be a recipe with a story, and I read it presuming it would follow a familiar concept: the author sharing a recipe and a story born many years ago in her mother’s kitchen, about how they had bonded over cooking, the pivotal importance of food and shared meals for the family, and so on. But this story had a twist. It turned out the author did not have many fond memories of her mother, and was never able to bond with this woman who seemed always distant and cold towards her daughter. The mother died many years ago, without any closeness ever having grown between them. But the daughter did remember a special pie her mother used to make, and one day she felt an urge to recreate it, though there was no recipe. She tried and tried and after many failures was able to bake a good-enough replica of the original, and through the process and the taste of it, she brought back memories. Good memories. Of the effort her mother put into making this particular delicious dish for her, and that maybe this was the way her mother showed a love she was otherwise unable to express.
</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhETZc4jMGQ2Kxef49cot0pmzJt4u7iYcUmTfkdSB1p_v6qOBG-gAa6nf4QLDb9YYBcfKWoJGFDNcNzjmXvgcAOMu4RphoYRn0tHaxa2E8LszHNIc-9EmL54aMYbRUk5tkRoKcDEoIbLUw/s1600-h/jolanda.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhETZc4jMGQ2Kxef49cot0pmzJt4u7iYcUmTfkdSB1p_v6qOBG-gAa6nf4QLDb9YYBcfKWoJGFDNcNzjmXvgcAOMu4RphoYRn0tHaxa2E8LszHNIc-9EmL54aMYbRUk5tkRoKcDEoIbLUw/s320/jolanda.png" border="0" alt="Jolanda with cat" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5128041110630153842" /></a>
<p>
I love my mother. But she did not teach me how to cook. She reigned alone in the territories she considered her own, which is to say, anything relating to the household, including the kitchen. I have few memories of being allowed to help her with preparing a meal as a child, though I remember wanting to. Sometimes she'd run out of the kitchen mid-dinner preparation and hand me a mug stuffed to the brim with sprigs of parsley and a big pair of scissors, only to disappear quickly back to boiling pots and sizzling meat. I’d point those scissors all the way down to the bottom of the mug and earnestly snip away until the parsley was fine enough to meet my mother’s standards. Sometimes, if I was really persistent in asking to help, my mother would let me mix the salad dressing, after she had measured all of the ingredients and put them in a bowl. And sometimes, way back in the very distant past, before we had an electric mixer, I would be allowed to whip cream. This was a pretty big deal, because fresh whipped cream meant special dessert, maybe even guests, and because this particular chore required some skill. The liquid cream and a dash of sugar were poured into a little bowl-like contraption, with two beaters attached to a crank on the bottom of a red lid, and a big round white knob on top for turning. The bowl had to be held tightly level with one hand while energetically turning the knob with other. I had to be very careful not to spin the lid off the bowl and cause a spill. Also, the consistency had to be just so. Too much beating and I'd spoil it, turning light fluffy whipped cream into chunky butter, and risk the wrath of my mother, who then as now, took great pride in serving a good meal.
</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-HFVSs3Ou1s7_tUwtI7395uF5Pc0K19WWxsMt-UVh9YaXPHMC-aqN5GRlnoF4gr6bcHQsRwq-YH7FS_MNyrNhAEDLrNIMk2Ja89g91DJczj-qU2iNocscVYBzOIClgVQVtzcfjrw2UIg/s1600-h/jolandaFoon.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-HFVSs3Ou1s7_tUwtI7395uF5Pc0K19WWxsMt-UVh9YaXPHMC-aqN5GRlnoF4gr6bcHQsRwq-YH7FS_MNyrNhAEDLrNIMk2Ja89g91DJczj-qU2iNocscVYBzOIClgVQVtzcfjrw2UIg/s320/jolandaFoon.png" border="0" alt="Jolanda food" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5128041097745251938" /></a>
<p>
In other words, by the time I left home, I did not know how to cook even an egg. Turns out, it never mattered. I had learned the important things through observation. My mother used to call out in her native Dutch: eat, this is healthy food, it will make you strong. We had no formal knowledge of vitamins, roughage or antioxidants. But I would no sooner have forgone fruits, vegetables, and dairy than I would have fed my cat a diet of marshmallows. Even during those unregulated days when I was a college student first living on my own, and cooking an actual meal was not one of the rhythms of my life, I would live on whole wheat bread and cheese, supplemented by the occasional banana, and would regularly dig into a can of unheated vegetables for a fix of health and strength. Brussels sprouts lifted out one by one with a fork and dipped in ketchup. Loving it, too, though even I’m having a hard time imagining that, now that my culinary tastes have developed somewhat beyond those early days away from my mother’s table.
</p>
<span id="fullpost">
<p>
After I got married, regular home-cooked meals became a part of our new togetherness, as naturally as all the other things that were a part of married life, like talking and making love. I enthusiastically started to experiment with recipes and ingredients both familiar and new, and discovered the joy not only of cooking, but of being responsible for a meal prepared with forethought and consumed with pleasure. This continued after the births of our four sons, though admittedly the menu did fluctuate somewhat with respect to age-related eating habits of the children, as well as state of exhaustion of the cook. There were days that we didn’t get beyond canned baked beans and chicken nuggets served with a sliced tomato and some yoghurt for desert. But in the weekends, there was time for serious cooking and eating. My sons were introduced to a wide pallet of tastes as soon as they had enough teeth to dig into the dish. None of them were picky eaters, though each developed a few dislikes. There were those who didn't like fish, or cilantro, or creamed spinach. Those who wanted blue cheese on everything, and those who didn’t. Because I could never keep straight who liked what, everyone was simply served whatever was cooked. And expected to eat it. Which they did, most of the time.
</p>
<p>
Getting my young and unruly family to sit down at the dinner table at the same time was rarely easy. For one, my husband’s time and energy were consumed so thoroughly by his career that his place at the table remained empty on weekdays for many years. There were sports, play dates, school activities and much more to incorporate somehow. It was, in short, something of a struggle to simply get everyone to show up. Still. There was never any doubt in my mind that there would be this communal evening meal. That TV and thumping music would be switched off and there would be talking, even on those days that underlying tensions and mini-power struggles turned conversation into something that could more fairly be described as argument.
</p>
<p>
I began to understand my mother’s longing for a break every once in a while, though. She had her own variation of a cook’s day off: every Saturday she served something the Dutch call a broodmaaltijd. A bread meal. Being my mother, although it is true that there was little actual cooking involved, I suspect she took just as much time to prepare it as a regular hot meal. There were three or four kinds of bread, trays daintily arranged with sliced boiled eggs, cucumber and tomato, various types of cheeses and cold cuts and fish, bowls of ripe strawberries. What made these meals so memorable was that this was a day less dominated by schedules, and we would sometimes sit at the table for hours, building the perfect sandwich, picking off those last olives, and taking the time to tell and listen and laugh at a good long story.
</p>
<p>
Despite excellent memories of the broodmaaltijd of my youth, this was not going to give me the kind of breather I was longing for now that I was cook for a family that kept me very busy, all the time. Back in those early days, we had a single car which my husband needed for work, so everyday activities for the rest of us involved a lot of walking. The boys were too young to be left home alone, and everyone came along to whatever was going on. One Friday, as usual, we were walking home from the gym where the two oldest boys had judo lessons. The baby was bathed and ready to be popped into bed as soon as we got home, strapped into the stroller in his little footsy pajamas, his 3-year old brother walking alongside with his hand clutching the side bar. The young judokas still wearing their white Gi uniforms underneath their coats. It was a chilly late-autumn evening, pitch dark at 5:00, a light drizzle falling. I was very tired. Suddenly, the thought of getting home and having to prepare a meal was overwhelming and on a whim, I stopped at our corner fast food joint to pick up french fries and other decidedly unhealthy deep-fried yellow food. Once we go home, we continued to break all the rules. Bags of food were placed on the coffee table and dug into, a favorite Disney film popped into the VCR. Bedtime came and went. We lounged and relaxed and chatted and enjoyed ourselves and dipped our fries into mounds of mayonnaise in the way preferred by the Dutch. Right then and there, Friday/Fast Food Day was born. The weekly movie was as much a part of this meal as the greasy food, and we all took turns picking one. In time I was introduced to the horror genre preferred by my sons, and they to my old favorites like “Grease” and “Out of Africa” - our tastes clearly differing but the shared experience always satisfying.
</p>
<p>
To this day, communal dinner at our home remains a fluid institution, adapting to the ever-shifting needs and coming and goings of a modern family, quite different from the strictly regimented meal of my youth. Though reality was often far removed from the sweet traditional utopia understood in, say, a Normal Rockwell picture, dinnertime has always been a magnet drawing and keeping us together. It was, for example, discovered by my hard-working husband as a way to spend joyful time immersed in family affairs once he decided Sunday was his cooking day. He flamboyantly cooked up self-invented dishes like Nasi Bassy, made of stir-fried whatever was in the fridge served over rice. Anyone in the mood was welcome to join in chopping and stirring, or put in special requests for that favorite spicy peanut sauce, or that side dish of stuffed giant portobello mushrooms. And when the boys started leaving home one by one to go to college, each would inevitably start out celebrating Everyday/Fast Food Day. They were surprised at how quickly they tired of it, and began to long for staples like green beans and boiled potatoes, and started tentatively preparing their own meals. It looks like the home-cooked meal is going to take root in the next generation, where it can continue to build healthy bodies, foster the joy of wonderful dishes and flavors, and build lasting bonds with those sharing the table. For me, this means remembering my mother's meals, the thousands served in my own home, and looking forward in anticipation to my children's own interpretations of the family dinner.
</p>
</span>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-89607168205305013672007-10-30T19:34:00.000-07:002007-10-30T20:27:41.771-07:00Biphle iPhone Game<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/Sean.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/Sean.jpg" border="0" alt="Sean J. Vaughan headshot" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Sean%20J.%20Vaughan">Sean J. Vaughan</a>
</p>
<p>
<a href="http://biphle.com/">Big Biphle</a> is a Big Boggle clone I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It is customized for the Apple iPhone but it should play fine in your web browser.
</p>
<p>
The objective of Big Biphle is to list, within 3 minutes, as many 4 or more letter words of the highest point value as you can find among the random assortment of letters in the grid.
</p>
<p>
Have fun!
</p>
<p>
<iframe width="320px" height="420" src="http://biphle.com/" frameborder="0"></iframe>
</p>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-55171081619923882012007-10-29T18:06:00.000-07:002007-10-29T18:09:25.729-07:00Hiatus<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiquBRQmQF_7i-_Yvz_5OcnbfAnDMIWo119KQtjWMMAZHPgk9UYoB4CRFUz2iCkhDHvvoQrXdGVCuxdW_2VM9MM84kTjxhUPkk03uzjR3pmGpSp9bnL6tu2LrcW9l_34tl3aWwPZDtEz1c/s1600-h/THE+SUMMER+OF+GREEN+PEARS_html_4495c7f7.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiquBRQmQF_7i-_Yvz_5OcnbfAnDMIWo119KQtjWMMAZHPgk9UYoB4CRFUz2iCkhDHvvoQrXdGVCuxdW_2VM9MM84kTjxhUPkk03uzjR3pmGpSp9bnL6tu2LrcW9l_34tl3aWwPZDtEz1c/s200/THE+SUMMER+OF+GREEN+PEARS_html_4495c7f7.jpg" border="0" alt="Carle P. Graffunder headshot" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5058535725304286098" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Carle%20P.%20Graffunder">Carle Phillip Graffunder</a>
</p>
<p>
A single white-capped wave that crests an ocean’s swell<br/>
Itself is not the sea. <br/>
In fjords and firths the tides rise higher <br/>
Until they almost touch the wings of sea-birds flying there, <br/>
But tides are not the sea. <br/>
Above them all with fine-tuned sight <br/>
Clear-eyed wing-ed gladiators of the open sky <br/>
Can see antipodes and back. <br/>
Yet the world, though hugely grand, does not reveal the soul.
</p>
<p>
The zeal of confidence that makes me know what I do not know <br/>
May urge me ever on to wider scenes of deed and thought; <br/>
But I know glint of light on surface sea does not reveal the deep <br/>
Where genies of power guard the graveyard of the sun.
</p>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-91711500583045375362007-10-25T22:31:00.000-07:002007-10-25T22:39:03.243-07:00The prelinguistic turn<p>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Justin%20Zijlstra">Justin Jijlstra</a>
</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNT-u7OEPYz4i21AVdHOJLvXbyREPBNi1QyLOpHxcjti4H2hQAEtsHWmlsya2Hs-40KTqP-Ztp1ic7mXgAAl0p9CXKKlLkN2J8eC5rN2KYKcQuZ1ZeuRGCcRxxQj_4fpuh2S4FR9eBiyI/s1600-h/Justin.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNT-u7OEPYz4i21AVdHOJLvXbyREPBNi1QyLOpHxcjti4H2hQAEtsHWmlsya2Hs-40KTqP-Ztp1ic7mXgAAl0p9CXKKlLkN2J8eC5rN2KYKcQuZ1ZeuRGCcRxxQj_4fpuh2S4FR9eBiyI/s320/Justin.png" border="0" alt="Justin Jijlstra" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5125515279018081874" /></a>
<p>
Has there ever been a step in the Occident that contravenes the change of discourse? Hmm.
</p>
<p>
Has there ever been a step in the Occident that? Hmm.
</p>
<p>
The problem of fashion - for me - is that it is nameable by savant idiots and idiot savants alike. However, to make a distinctive eloquent sequence of verbal gestures about anything does not move the "si" and the "is". Yes, to me the savant idiot "si's" to much and the idiot savant is the modern solipsist qua philosophy prelinguistically, too much of an "is" from the outside, but worst of all its internal mirrors shine without the gods complaining about its Hubris, or in short: "What is it about behaviour that makes people automagically go.. "yes"? "Narcissus!"
</p>
<p>
When you hear someone utter, "These advanced techniques...", I hope for this occasion that you want to hear something that fosters your imagination. But I am a protean thinker of thoughts and like to fashion myself as thinkerer of unsecular particularities while ad libbing my way through gnosis by way of serendipity haha.
</p>
<p>
So I ask, ""si"-like", the following thing to you my dear reader by way of exclamation:
<blockquote>
"How can our savant idiocy be idiomatic while our idiots are savant?"
</blockquote>
</p>
<span id="fullpost">
<p>
I Exclaim completely and doubly here: "Why do didy- or poly- mous nods (brrr, the air I imagine from this! I could have gotten Goosified!) at principles that we understand?”
</p>
<p>
It satisfies the occasion and burns down the house only... Right? It makes me resound Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power which I haven’t finished yet: “It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. “
Oh hack, I'm going too quickly here! Yes..
</p>
<p>
Some.., fat.., twat..! This century is. Imaginary Hell! For as far as I know only the subspaces of genius are the places I do not dislike. So that essentially makes me some kind of self-imagining Hubris and, to the outside, a pedestrian alternating currents with predictability and proteanism.
</p>
<p>
Sigh..
</p>
<p>
Yes, the prelinguistic turn...
</p>
<p>
So I could crypto-summarise the above as follows:
<blockquote>
"Hybris is having no feet".
</blockquote>
<p>
And indeed, this radical approach should be "fashioned" as follows: "Having no feet whilst being able to move, is not god like, it is a technicality".
</p>
<p>
May I remind you of:
<blockquote>"Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth." - Archimedes
</blockquote>
</p>
<p>
The frivolity of this each time strikes me as the most frivolous of genius I know. And indeed, frivolity is that which distinguishes the pedestrian from the god. I actually feel my eyes get soft at this point, I fashion my imagination to be of Greek ascent and experience a moment of height, not in the spatial sense though, but in the being movement without feet.
</p>
<p>
Essentially, this turn (prelinguistic) for me signifies the movement of bodies without feet. How can one imagine a turn being made without innate position?
Well actually it is easy, simply utter it. How elusively evident is that? Right, however what you understand should not conform in my eyes to formalism. The question is, will it socially be information to rely on? (That without the turn.)
</p>
<p>
Actually it is a suggestion which encourages you to continue your road to fashion which is signification in other words. Yes, a friend of mine uses the words: "Ad Autoratum" jokingly in this case, but it has seriously been fashioned in my mind so I try to construct sentences that are commensurable with the imagination. Yes, I intuit Hubris as being the epitome of the homo significans but without being significant. The homo significans is the savant idiot whereof one can speak. However the ones without feet move outside the “spheres of significans” in this regard and may I remind you of Archimedes? I really do not want to sound like a psycho-fetishist but I really, really also feel the urge to speak with authenticity for a moment. But not more then a moment. I just want to taste it and enjoy the reproduction of worlds in a frivolous way and indeed without the feet.
</p>
<p>
So at last. I've had my first intuition after, well its proper here, I think:
<blockquote>
I would thank a Jonathan Hayward for the inspiration and you for reading.
</blockquote>
</p>
<p>
I will leave you with a final thought to consider:
<blockquote>
What is left of culture when you haven't got the feet?
</blockquote>
</p>
<p>
Chow!
</p>
<p>
Justin
</p>
</span>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-20832223885800021102007-10-22T17:48:00.000-07:002007-10-22T17:53:56.583-07:00Charlie's Eden<p>
by Michael D. Wolok
</p>
<p>
On a lark, I decided to investigate the shoreline due east from
the University of Miami. In my wandering, I stumbled upon a park
some Miamians know, some Miamians never heard of, and some
Miamians only think they know.
</p>
<p>
After strolling a short distance into the park, I came across
three spacious ponds linked by two inlets. Overhung with trees,
the inlets appeared like portals to other worlds.
Surrounded by different terrain and possessing its own unique
set of inhabitants, each pond was another world. The terrain
varied from wide-open fields of lush green grass speckled with
palm trees, gumbo-limbo and banyan, to a forest of gnarled oaks,
to hardwood hammocks, to tall saw grass.
</p>
<p>
Traipsing around these ponds, I spotted on a distant embankment a
nine-and-a-half foot green monster—popularly
known as an alligator. With closed eyelids, it lay motionless
steeping in the sun's rays. Plopped in the middle of this
pristine park, it paradoxically seemed at once both out of place
and right at home.
</p>
<p>
Two inclinations struggled for supremacy: one, advance closer to
better observe this oddity; two, get the "H" out of there to
protect my hide. The gator's hypnotic stillness and shut eyelids
coaxed my feet a few steps forward—still
leaving an expanse of some twenty-odd feet between us.
</p>
<p>
I stood in a trance, gazing at the freakish creature. Then I
swung around it, as if I were affixed to the moving leg of a
drafting compass, the stationary leg resting on the gator. An
equilibrium between fear and curiosity set the distance between
us. When I finally decided to leave and took a step away, the
alligator comically popped-open his eyelids, as if he had been
aware of my presence all along. I departed with a smile.
</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH7_Ni91DmdLwuAZn3z78YGDsivEA0Swu_PdlZahtzxGoBXym6TsnJA5q8Y7pzEAiziJwwYDuXUncE2kSmFTjD3oC6zePyTJ1wSNw3r9UzmaEyJE5Xbgr5DqWeplSNeXtNIFouZkaLnRY/s1600-h/Charlies+Eden_html_m143a4c3e.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH7_Ni91DmdLwuAZn3z78YGDsivEA0Swu_PdlZahtzxGoBXym6TsnJA5q8Y7pzEAiziJwwYDuXUncE2kSmFTjD3oC6zePyTJ1wSNw3r9UzmaEyJE5Xbgr5DqWeplSNeXtNIFouZkaLnRY/s400/Charlies+Eden_html_m143a4c3e.jpg" border="0" alt="Alligator Charlie"id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5124328187669424418" /></a>
<span id="fullpost">
<p>
This park piqued my senses, and I would return to it again and
again. Each new visit bequeathed novel gifts. Once after a hard
rain, a flock of snow-white ibises blanketed a patch of land.
With their long, curved, bright-red bills, they probed the soil.
A family of gallinules—duck-like birds with
beaks resembling orange and yellow Halloween
candy—swam the ponds. And in the palm trees,
blue jays skirmished with red-bellied woodpeckers for berries.
</p>
<p>
The props of the mangrove trees were shot with an assortment of
birds who fished the ponds' rich waters. A yellow-crowned night
heron (whose heads are striped with a distinctive black-and-white
band) inhabited the middle pond. And an ever-present Little Green
Heron exploited a tree limb over the edge of the south pond to
snatch fish. Though seemingly neckless, Little Green Herons
humorously can, at any time, pop-out a long neck. Bird-watching
seemed to be the most boring activity on earth until this park
introduced me to large, strikingly patterned birds with
intriguing behavior patterns.
</p>
<p>
A mom, a pop, and three trailing, waddling, baby raccoons made
the rounds of the park's trash cans every night, exactly one-half
hour before closing. Occasionally, a sinewy fox with dainty legs
would trot into the picnic area. The raccoons, foxes and
squirrels would often approach within a few feet to eat a morsel
of food tossed to them.
</p>
<p>
Hordes of giant land crabs invaded the park, yearly. The crabs
pocked the park with burrows—where they
quickly retreated upon sensing any earth vibration. These crabs
resembled alien creatures from another planet, lifted from a
low-grade B movie: eyes at the ends of their antennae, brown
fuzzy beards, legs that only worked sideways, and a strange,
vertical mouth only a mother could love.
</p>
<p>
But the main attraction was the gator I had stumbled upon on my
first visit. I'd circle the ponds searching for him. If I spied
him my day was made, if not, I'd leave feeling empty. This
alligator's presence was a sign of
mankind's maturity and tolerance, a sign of
mankind's ability to live in harmony with
nature. He provided a magic "antidote to civilization." This
gator and his serene Eden seemed remote from a speedy and greedy
world inhabited by laser scanners, fax machines, and arbitrage.
Peering at this prehistoric beast allowed me to drift to another
epoch. Any moment, I expected a brontosaurus head to rise above
the distant treetops. With this anachronism out-stretched on the
bank of one of his primeval-looking ponds, such a sight would
have seemed perfectly natural.
</p>
<p>
This gator, though, proffered an even greater incongruity than an
ancient presence in a modern world. Had I met this gator in the
Everglades or at a zoo, our meeting would not have been so
peculiar. What made this gator exceptional, almost surreal, was
that he meandered freely about in a very public park, in the
middle of Miami—a park where children played,
and people picnicked. Here was a free-roaming gator on human turf
(or free-roaming humans on gator turf?), peacefully coexisting.
</p>
<p>
The "regulars"—those who visited the park
often—informed me that the gator's name was
Charlie, that he had resided at the park ever since people could
remember. With fascination, I watched the regulars toss Charlie
bread and chicken.
</p>
<p>
Charlie hung-out at two favorite haunts. In the first pond, he
"tanned" at a specific site on the
far bank. And when he had the munchies, he loitered at the
southern edge of the third pond. Curiously, both these places
were marked with a sign that read: "I'll bite the hand that feeds
me!" followed by a supposed drawing of an alligator that looked
more like a manatee; followed by the word, "Danger!" As if
literate, Charlie rarely strayed far from either of these signs.
Though, he did have a secluded place in the mangroves of the
middle pond where he hid when he wished not to be disturbed.
</p>
<p>
Once, two young girls frolicking around the third pond sighted
Charlie at the pond's edge. With scared giggles, they bounded
onto a picnic table even though other children had formed a
semicircle around him. Eventually, they descended, joining the
crowd. Then they teased each other, playfully trying to push one
another toward him.
</p>
<p>
There was a foolish child who dashed up to Charlie, threw
stones in his face, and scampered away shouting, "He is coming
after me, he is going to eat me!" Charlie, though, literally
turned the other cheek, taking all abuse stoically. So far as I
know, he never made an aggressive move toward any
human<sup><b><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote1anc"
href="#sdfootnote1sym" id=
"sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a></b></sup>. When the taunting
grew too great, he would, with a certain insouciance and
savoir-faire, gracefully propel himself toward the center of the
pond with a few slow swishes of his tail.
</p>
<p>
Charlie's south-end haunt was, also, a favorite spot for other
park wildlife. When picnickers tossed bread into the pond, the
crystal clear waters erupted in a vigorous boil as frenzied zebra
fish rapaciously attacked the food in acts of plunder that would
shame piranha. A whole loaf of bread disintegrated amid violent
thrashing and sucking sounds in seconds. Foot-long snook and
tarpon lunged at these fish creating explosive, startling
splashes that sent everyone scurrying away from the shore,
because they'd mistakenly be attributed to the arrival of a
gator.
</p>
<p>
The slurping noises of the zebra fish attracted numerous painted
turtles and a few shy, snapping turtles, which vied with the fish
for the scraps. Enough commotion summoned Charlie, the king, who
always made a slow, dignified, quiet approach.
</p>
<p>
In one of my first visits to this area, I witnessed something
curious scooting about underwater. When it surfaced, it appeared
to be a baby Loch Ness monster; closer examination, though,
proved it, an anhinga. An anhinga (also, called a "darter" or
"snake bird") is a bird with an average wingspan of two-feet, a
long, snake-like neck, and the ability to dart around underwater.
When an anhinga swims above the water, only its head and long
neck are visible, its body strangely remains
submerged—giving it that
"Loch Ness Monster" appearance.
</p>
<p>
It became a familiar sight to see the anhinga spear fish beneath
the water with its pointy beak, surface, climb onto its perch,
flick its catch into the air, gulp it down, then hang its wings
out to dry. Charlie, the anhinga, and the Little Green Heron
formed a close-knit club that shared this corner of the pond:
Charlie would surprisingly pay the anhinga no heed even when it
would occasionally swim in front of his snout.
</p>
<p>
A man who passed by this site observed the turtles, the fish, the
heron, the anhinga, and Charlie. He, also, witnessed a water
snake wondrously slithering across the surface of the water,
catching fish, taking the catch ashore in its mouth, and in plain
view devouring it. He noticed that the animals acted nearly
oblivious to man, as if enchanted. He then exclaimed, "Disney,
eat your heart out!"
</p>
<p>
On a sweltering summer day, a formal wedding took place by the
pond; tuxedos were de rigueur. An accordionist began playing,
"Here comes the bride." Now, I can't exactly say that Charlie was
a discriminating music critic, but he did like music. Music meant
people and people meant food. So, you can guess who reverently
pulled-up in the pond just behind the line of wedding guests.
</p>
<p>
The music continued to play, as Charlie was noticed, first by one
guest—whose gaze was now transfixed over his
shoulder at Charlie, instead of at the wedding
couple—and then by another. Soon, all the
guests were warily throwing furtive glances at Charlie.
</p>
<p>
Finally, the bride and groom noticed something amiss; they
realized they were no longer the center of attention. One
snickering guest silently pointed to Charlie. After a little
discussion and a little nervous laughter, the procession shifted
a tad away from Charlie and the pond, and the ceremony continued
without further ado.
</p>
<p>
Then there was the time, I saw two elderly women strolling around
the pond. Camouflaged in the tall saw grass, Charlie was resting
peacefully at one of his favorite haunts. The two women were
absorbed in conversation, not paying much attention where they
were going, and they were on a direct collision course for
Charlie. Standing on the opposite embankment, there was little I
could do. I could almost hear the theme from Jaws playing in the
background. At a separation of not more than five-feet, Charlie
was—shall we say—noticed.
With Olympic agility, the seniors quickly managed to distance
themselves from Charlie; then gaped at him while alternately
eyeing each other in amazement. They then laughed while gingerly
negotiating their way around him.
</p>
<p>
In his time, Charlie endured quite a few fools and crazies. There
was once a father who playfully dangled his two-year old daughter
several feet above Charlie's nose while his petrified wife looked
on in stunned horror. And there were reckless teenagers who threw
coke bottles at Charlie as he floated in the center of a pond.
</p>
<p>
Perhaps, too, some might have considered me one of the
crazies: for after a time, I fed Charlie out of my
hand<sup><b><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote2anc"
href="#sdfootnote2sym" id=
"sdfootnote2anc"><sup>2</sup></a></b></sup>, and pet his nose
and back. His back felt surprisingly pliant and squished like the
back of a frog, and his nose felt hard and hollow like
papier-mâché.
</p>
<p>
In fact, I would occasionally put on
"shows" for the picnickers. First,
I'd toss a trail of marshmallows, a favorite alligator
delight<sup><b><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote3anc"
href="#sdfootnote3sym" id=
"sdfootnote3anc"><sup>3</sup></a></b></sup>into the pond.
Charlie was keyed into the sound of splashing marshmallows. He'd
follow the trail to shore, munching each marshmallow on his way.
Gators like to wallow in the marsh, so it only stands to reason
that they would like "marsh
wallows" . . . olkay, so I'm no
humorist. I guess Dave Barry at the Miami Herald can now rest
easy, knowing I'm not about to take his day
job anytime soon. Anyway, after Charlie arrived at the
pond's edge, I'd set afloat a slightly used
hamburger on a bun, I had scrounged from picnic leftovers. If
Charlie was hungry, h<img src="Charlies%20Eden_html_7462a35d.gif"
align="left" hspace="12">e devoured the hamburger, bun and all.
If not, he'd nudge the bun away with his snout, and dive for the
sinking hamburger.
</p>
<p>
Charlie prized barbecued spareribs and chicken above all: Jutting
his head high out of the water, he crushed the bones with
startlingly loud, chilling, bone-crunching
sounds—which invariably evoked
"oohs" and
"aahs" from the picnickers. Then
I'd call him to shore and feed him a package of hot dogs,
one-at-a-time, right out of my hand.
</p>
<p>
My actions were predicated on hundreds of hours observing
Charlie. During the first year, I kept my distance. But every
time I spotted him, I'd summon my courage and charily approach a
tad closer. Then one day while he was sunning himself, I
approached too close. Like a lightning bolt, he exploded into the
water generating a thundering splash, and in fractions of a
second was gazing at me from the center of the pond. I, then,
realized Charlie was more afraid of me, than I, of him. Charlie
appeared to act wary and apprehensive just like feral cats I have
been known to rescue and tame<sup><b><a class="sdfootnoteanc"
name="sdfootnote4anc" href="#sdfootnote4sym" id=
"sdfootnote4anc"><sup>4</sup></a></b></sup>.
</p>
<p>
Whenever Charlie was in the vicinity of humans, he moved with
extreme caution and hesitancy. When I first fed him hot dogs on
plate by the pond's edge, he wouldn't approach the plate if I was
nearby. Only after I moved far away, would he approach the plate.
Then he would select a single hot dog from the pile, swim to the
middle of the pond with it hanging-off the side of his mouth like
a Groucho Marx cigar. Only then would he eat it. He repeated this
ritual with each hot dog. However, each time I returned to the
park, he allowed me to stand a little closer to the plate.
Eventually, he felt comfortable enough to eat the hot dogs while
I stood nearby.
</p>
<p>
Then I fed him one hot dog skewered on a very, very long branch.
With great care, he removed the hot dog from the branch, and ate
it. After many such feedings, I gradually reduced the length of
the branch, till finally I felt comfortable feeding him out of my
hand. Still, I gave Charlie a lot of respect, and was always on
full guard. But after a time, I came to believe Charlie viewed me
no differently than the feral cats I've rescued and tamed.
</p>
<p>
Because of Charlie, I made a study of alligators and learned:
Alligators have different personalities; they can be house pets
to at least four-and-a-half feet; they can be housebroken and
taught tricks; and they can recognize a human who hasn't been
seen for two years<sup><b><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name=
"sdfootnote5anc" href="#sdfootnote5sym" id=
"sdfootnote5anc"><sup>5</sup></a></b></sup>. This is not the
stereotypical image promoted by the media. Nor is this the
stereotypical image most people have of gators. As it turns out,
gators are not aggressive, purely instinctual creatures with
pea-sized brains, as they are often characterized or portrayed.
In fact, alligators and crocodiles do not share the same
temperament: Crocodiles are often aggressive, alligators
generally are not<sup><b><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name=
"sdfootnote6anc" href="#sdfootnote6sym" id=
"sdfootnote6anc"><sup>6</sup></a></b></sup>. One, notable
exception to this rule is a mother alligator defending her
young.
</p>
<p>
The late Rube Allyn (no relation to Rube Goldberg), former
head of The Great Outdoor Publishing Company, and an alligator
expert once said: "An alligator really
compares to the cow of our domestic animals. A human could jump
in the same pond with a dozen alligators and never get a scratch.
Alligators are retiring . . . [but there are] all kinds of animal
personalities . . ."<sup><b><a class=
"sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote7anc" href="#sdfootnote7sym" id=
"sdfootnote7anc"><sup>7</sup></a></b></sup>
</p>
<p>
As a matter of fact, at Everglades National Park, the US National
Parks Service conducts public, nature treks through thigh-deep,
wild-gator infested marsh. The marsh near Shark River Valley loop
Road is literally teaming with hundreds of wild gators. Gators
are visible all along the road. Yet, children are allowed to go
on these marsh tours and hike alone on this road. The US Parks
Service would not do this, if alligators posed the threat to
humans that most people suppose.
</p>
<p>
In Florida, it is a misdemeanor to molest an alligator. Now, I
know that there are those of you (particularly, Dave Barry) out
there who are wondering: "Who in the world
would be dumb enough or perverted enough to try to molest a
gator?" "All kidding
aside," feeding an alligator is construed under
Florida statute as gator molestation. And as laws go, it's a
pretty good law. When alligators are fed, they can lose their
fear of man, and like the bears at Yellowstone National Park can
become a nuisance, and even a hazard, if they begin to beg for
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—or worse
yet, don't beg, just take.
</p>
<p>
In this particular case, I was not aware of the state law when I
fed Charlie. Also, I knew he had been fed for years and was still
being fed by countless others, and had never become a nuisance.
Moreover, Charlie always had a cornucopia of food in the pond. It
still wasn't right, and I don't excuse myself, but I merely offer
mitigating circumstances. We all have our vices, mine was feeding
Charlie.
</p>
<p>
After five years of visiting the park on a regular basis, I
became occupied with personal matters and returned infrequently.
When I did return, I noticed the absence of the Little Green
Heron, the anhinga, and Charlie. I asked the regulars, but no one
knew a thing.
</p>
<p>
Adjoining Charlie's park lay the largest
botanical garden in the world. Charlie often visited this garden,
and its eight ponds—admittedly without paying
its five-dollar admission.
</p>
<p>
The caretaker—a simple, good-natured, cheerful
fellow—lives in a coral house on the premises.
During the day, he patrols the garden by bicycle. At closing
time, he drives a cart along the garden path to ensure the park
is empty.
</p>
<p>
One day, I visited the garden, late. As closing time drew near,
the caretaker offered to take me in his cart to the front gate.
While riding with him, I apprehensively queried about the local
gator.
</p>
<p>
The caretaker replied that he had always felt uncomfortable
with gators in the garden's ponds, that he believed gators were a
constant threat and danger. He said sometime last
September<sup><b><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name=
"sdfootnote8anc" href="#sdfootnote8sym" id=
"sdfootnote8anc"><sup>8</sup></a></b></sup> in the early
morning, he saw a gator laying on a concrete path by one of the
garden's ponds, and knew that visitors often
fed this gator. He told me, he called the Florida Freshwater and
Game Commission to dispose of the "nuisance" alligator, and they
did. In my alligator studies, I learned it is quite normal for
alligators—which are
cold-blooded—to warm themselves on
sun-drenched slabs of rock (indistinguishable to an alligator
from a concrete path) during the hours following
sunrise<sup><b><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote9anc"
href="#sdfootnote9sym" id=
"sdfootnote9anc"><sup>9</sup></a></b></sup>.
</p>
<p>
I called the Freshwater and Game Commission, and spoke to
Lieutenant Dick Lawrence, a wildlife officer. He told me that he
remembered the incident. He said that when a ranger went out to
the garden, the gator was found in one of the ponds, not on the
path. But with alligators no longer considered an endangered
species, the Freshwater and Game Commission will destroy just
about any gator against whom there is a
complaint—without determining whether or not
it's really a nuisance gator. Officer Lawrence said he had to act
on dubious complaints, because if he didn't, and perchance, one
of those alligators attacked someone, it would be his hide.
</p>
<p>
In his day, Charlie brought happiness, education, and unexpected
pleasure to thousands. A steady stream of first-timers,
"bumped" into Charlie. Some
considered him ugly and repulsive, others considered him majestic
and beautiful.
</p>
<p>
Many were incredulous that he could be a fixture at a park as
public as this. There were many who stood not more than ten-feet
from Charlie, and nonchalantly commented what a good meal he
would make or what a nice pair of shoes Charlie would make, even
as I would be feeding him out of my hand. If Charlie had wanted,
he could easily have had these cold-blooded louts for lunch. It
made me wonder which creature was less civilized, the alligator
who didn't eat humans or humans who would eat
a wondrous, semi-tame alligator. The irony of the situation was
never lost on me.
</p>
<p>
Most visitors found Charlie fascinating. Most derived uncommon
satisfaction from being able to walk-up to Charlie, and
scrutinize at close range his unusual features, like the flaps of
his ears and his valve-like nostrils. For most, he transformed
what otherwise would have been a routine day at the park into an
exceptionally rewarding experience.
</p>
<p>
And most discovered, what Seminole alligator wrestlers know, but
keep secret: Alligators are generally not feisty or ferocious,
and rarely have it in for humans. Alligators would rather relax
in the hot sun, than bite the rump of some buxom blond
— as depicted on so many Florida postcards.
With millions of gators out there, there are bound to be some
that are dangerous, but the same can, also, be said in no small
measure for homo-sapiens. Personally, I've
found humans to be much less trustworthy, and a lot more
aggressive and dangerous than alligators.
</p>
<p>
These days, I very seldom visit my idyllic paradise, Matheson
Hammock Park. It now seems lifeless and sterile. It's just not
the same—not without the little Green Heron,
the anhinga, and especially not without my prehistoric friend,
Charlie, who warmed and tickled the cockles of my
heart<sup><b><a class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote10anc"
href="#sdfootnote10sym" id=
"sdfootnote10anc"><sup>10</sup></a></b></sup>.
</p>
<hr/>
<h2>Footnotes</h2>
<div id="sdfootnote1">
<p>
<a class="sdfootnotesym-western" name="sdfootnote1sym" href=
"#sdfootnote1anc" id="sdfootnote1sym">1</a> Charlie did chase
and catch dogs, which for good reason were not allowed in the
park. Fortunately, I just heard about such apocryphal
incidents, and never witnessed such an occurrence. Though,
generally lethargic, alligators can sprint on land, up to
thirty-miles per hour to catch prey. Though, Charlie may have
caught dogs, he never attacked a child—which
is all the more remarkable since so many small children played
at the pond's edge where Charlie used to
hang-out and was fed by countless picnickers. Clearly, Charlie
distinguished dogs and small children, and he did not have
children on his menu. That in ten or more years, Charlie never
made an aggressive move toward any human, suggests he was
really never a threat to humans.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote2">
<p>
<a class="sdfootnotesym-western" name="sdfootnote2sym" href=
"#sdfootnote2anc" id="sdfootnote2sym">2</a> This was before I
knew that such conduct was illegal and caused the destruction
of alligators. I presume the statute of limitations for this
crime was up over a decade ago.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote3">
<p>
<a class="sdfootnotesym-western" name="sdfootnote3sym" href=
"#sdfootnote3anc" id="sdfootnote3sym">3</a> Margerie Stoneman
Douglas, the great matriarch of the Everglades, was known to
toss marshmallows to gators.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote4">
<p>
<a class="sdfootnotesym-western" name="sdfootnote4sym" href=
"#sdfootnote4anc" id="sdfootnote4sym">4</a> Please support
Miami's Cat Network, The Cat Network, Inc.,
P.O. Box 593026, Miami, FL 33159-3026, ,
http://www.thecatnetwork.org; and Sad Sack in Palm Beach, which
has helped me find good homes for dozens of dogs rescued from
Miami streets.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote5">
<p>
<a class="sdfootnotesym-western" name="sdfootnote5sym" href=
"#sdfootnote5anc" id="sdfootnote5sym">5</a> Dick Bothwell,
<i>The Great Outdoors Book Of Alligators And Other
Crocodilia</i>, (St. Petersburg, Florida: Great Outdoors
Publishing Co., 1962), pp. 31, 57-59.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote6">
<p>
<a class="sdfootnotesym-western" name="sdfootnote6sym" href=
"#sdfootnote6anc" id="sdfootnote6sym">6</a> There are more
people killed in Florida each year by lightning, than in the
last hundred years by alligators.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote7">
<p>
<a class="sdfootnotesym-western" name="sdfootnote7sym" href=
"#sdfootnote7anc" id="sdfootnote7sym">7</a> Ibid., p. 31.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote8">
<p>
<a class="sdfootnotesym-western" name="sdfootnote8sym" href=
"#sdfootnote8anc" id="sdfootnote8sym">8</a> I wrote this more
than a decade ago. Today, all alligators found to like
marshmallows are destroyed. <i>New York Times</i>;
National Desk; June 9, 2002, Sunday; In Florida, a Bold
Alligator Is a Dead One by Rick Bragg (NYT) Late Edition
— Final, Section 1, Page 1, Column 2. The
title of this article is really a misnomer. Based on the
article's contents, the article should be
titled In Florida, a Friendly Alligator Is a Dead One. I
don't believe that liking marshmallows is a
sign that an alligator is dangerous. And I
don't believe most fed alligators are
dangerous. I think people confuse tame behavior with aggressive
behavior. Bears become angry and aggressive, if you refuse them
food. I believe this is the case with alligators. Moreover, I
believe that alligators that have plenty of natural food
sources can be taught not to come out of the water and beg for
food.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote9">
<p>
<a class="sdfootnotesym-western" name="sdfootnote9sym" href=
"#sdfootnote9anc" id="sdfootnote9sym">9</a> Ibid., p. 7.
</p>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote10">
<p>
<a class="sdfootnotesym-western" name="sdfootnote10sym" href=
"#sdfootnote10anc" id="sdfootnote10sym">10</a> I am
writing this footnote more than fifteen years after I first
wrote Charlie's Eden. After my encounter
with Matheson Hammock, I fortuitously discovered another jewel
in the Miami-Dade County Park system,
Greynold's Park. Nature photographers, bird
watchers, and nature lovers from all over the world came to
this park to visit its rookery. Hundreds of egrets, thousands
of ibises, and many other different species of birds came to
this park to breed, nest, and raise their young. Nowhere else
in the world were humans able to get so close to nesting water
birds.
</p>
<p>
In breeding season, water birds develop fanciful, colorful
plumage. Ironically, few people from Dade County even knew this
rookery existed. Whenever, I saw someone with a camera,
binoculars, or just seeming to take pleasure in the rookery, I
would introduce myself, and ask them where they were from. They
came from all over the United States, from Germany, from
Belgium and from the Netherlands. There were photographers from
National Geographic. Queer as this may be, not a one ever
identified himself as a local.
</p>
<p>
Hurricane Andrew blew debris into the narrow passages that
connected the ponds to canals that feed into the ocean. The
park manager couldn't get permission to
clear the passages. Fertilizer runoff from an adjacent golf
course feed the algae in the stagnant pond waters. The ponds
"algaefied": algae bloomed in
the ponds, and spread across their surface. The
"algaefication" of the ponds
completely concealed the fish beneath the
water's surface, preventing water birds from
catching them—water birds need to see fish
in order to catch them.
</p>
<p>
Finally, water birds need to have an immediate source of food
when they have young to protect and feed. They
can't afford to leave the vicinity of their
nests to search for food as they might do otherwise. And they
need a nearby food source to be able to constantly feed their
young. Today, the rookery is dead, and the ponds are filled
with decaying, putrefying organic matter. Though, Miami-Dade
County parks did do some work clearing the inlets a few years
ago.
</p>
<p>
The Miami-Dade County park system does not know why the rookery
died, but does not consider it a great loss. After all, it
never brought in the kind of revenue the adjacent golf course
or county beach parks brought and bring in. The head of the
Miami-Dade County park system spoke the truth when he told me
that as far as Miami-Dade County parks went,
Greynold's rookery was greatly
under-utilized by local residents. He insisted that he had to
allocate the most funds to the parks that are most utilized and
produce the most revenue.
</p>
<p>
Not a single egret has nested in Greynold's
park in over eight years. Greynold's rookery
probably existed for hundreds of years. I thought it would be
around for a long time to come. I had just begun taking amazing
photographs at the rookery when suddenly there were no birds to
photograph, and the waters began to stink.
</p>
<p>
Miami's Audubon Society claimed
Greynold's rookery was
"off their radar screen," since
it is located in North Dade, and most of their members are
located in South Dade. They, further, said the
Greynold's birds are probably better off in
the Everglades, anyway. I thought the birds at
Greynold's park had an ideal location that
would be hard to match anywhere else. The islands of
Greynold's park offered nesting young
protection not found in the Everglades. And the clear, brackish
waters that flowed in Greynold's park were
teaming with fish. There are no feeding grounds like this in
the Everglades. Anyway, I don't know the
fate of Greynold's birds. But I do know that
their loss at Greynold's park is a great
loss for nature-lovers and bird-watchers the world over, if not
a loss for Miami locals.
</p>
</div>
</span>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-86156014843006446892007-10-18T22:06:00.000-07:002007-10-18T22:35:27.396-07:00Beer and Metaphysics<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/148765/BrianSchwartz.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/148765/BrianSchwartz.jpg" border="0" alt="Brian Schwartz headshot" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Brian%20Schwartz">Brian Schwartz</a>
</p>
<p>
The shopgirls in Saks have been making fun of me because my hair had got as long and bushy as the coyote who prowls the yard outside our door. Brush it, they screamed, so last night I cut it all off. And then, slick and elegant, I burst into the Crawpappy’s scene. Less crowded than usual, but a lot of my friends were there, and beer burnished the floating barroom world, and after a while it seemed as if the divine effulgence which, if one could only see it, covers the world like plastic laminate, shone on all present.
</p>
<p>
“You look like a genius,” one girl I’d never seen before called out, “tell me something about metaphysics!”
</p>
<p>
“Just make other people happy,” I said. “That way, no matter what the metaphysics, at least you’ve done something good in the world.”
</p>
<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXaZloLmV1k7n0pR37_IE5PFGfjsdKLtNZZbAgOrixTi1NSVOOQTh_39JaqvtAbItGKXya9VPSEDKxjEDQWll91dedSBWDS3aksL2hrb-0rajRQ3vAgzQM-NdhxEAciT6BNw0U0cVf5Gs/s1600-h/BrianCrawpappys.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXaZloLmV1k7n0pR37_IE5PFGfjsdKLtNZZbAgOrixTi1NSVOOQTh_39JaqvtAbItGKXya9VPSEDKxjEDQWll91dedSBWDS3aksL2hrb-0rajRQ3vAgzQM-NdhxEAciT6BNw0U0cVf5Gs/s400/BrianCrawpappys.png" border="0" alt="Brian at Crawpappy's" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5122917024624716050" /></a>
</p>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-53131127034282768942007-10-17T19:08:00.000-07:002007-10-17T19:09:34.353-07:00The Harmony of the Spheres<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/200/80614/Richard%20May%20for%20RandR.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/200/80614/Richard%20May%20for%20RandR.jpg" border="0" alt="Richard May headshot" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Richard%20May">Richard May</a>
</p>
<p>
The universal constants of Nature need to be adjusted. There obviously
has been a major error. There should have been at most one sentient being
per planet if not per universe, possibly excepting cats. The effects of
overcrowding are obvious, if you step outside your door. On a good day
it's like listening to all the music which has ever been played in the
history of the entire planet being loudly played simultaneously in the
same space without end. However, the medium is not merely auditory, but
includes all sensory modalities. One cannot always expect a good day.
</p>
<p>
May-Tzu
</p>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-72130052673267587832007-10-15T22:30:00.000-07:002007-10-15T22:33:28.720-07:00Orthographiae Ratio<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/148765/BrianSchwartz.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/148765/BrianSchwartz.jpg" border="0" alt="Brian Schwartz headshot" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Brian%20Schwartz">Brian Schwartz</a>
</p>
<p>
That’s the title of a book my dad gave me when I was ten years old. It
was printed in Venice in 1561, and was probably considered inscrutable
even then. The patina of the centuries have only added to the mystery.
It’s a 600 page list of Latin words, each followed, not with a
definition, but with strange Latin phrases, transcriptions of Roman
inscriptions that were ancient even when collected, and weird square
tables of letters that look like a cryptographic puzzle, a whole
collection of Rosetta stones artfully arranged for the
edification of the viewer.
</p>
<p>
I hadn't seen the book in years and assumed it was safely locked away,
but yesterday I found it stuffed in the back of a closet behind some old
hats. The binding has been damaged, but that scarcely matters since the
binding was done later. The pages are quite fresh, in better condition
than some of the yellowing paperbacks I bought in college.
</p>
<p>
On a whim, I looked up the title on the Internet. To my surprise, I got
quite a few hits, including an article in the fabled 11th edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica. The author, it seems, was what the Britannica
called an “infant prodigy”. He wrote that book when he was fourteen. It
is an attempt to find rules for Latin spelling (which, of course, more
or less has no rules). Those strange tables, done 450 years ago, were
what geniuses through the ages have always done, or tried to do... to
impose order on the random and unknowable, to deduce the rules of the
universe from a grain of sand. An impossible, Quixotic quest perhaps,
but a noble journey nonetheless.
</p>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-61878019016887452472007-10-11T23:16:00.000-07:002007-10-11T23:19:14.873-07:00Prolegomena To Any Future Obfuscation<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/200/80614/Richard%20May%20for%20RandR.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/200/80614/Richard%20May%20for%20RandR.jpg" border="0" alt="Richard May headshot" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Richard%20May">Richard May</a>
</p>
<p>
What is the relationship between the reality of existence and the
existence of reality? This question is answered quite clearly in
May-Tzu's Prolegomena To Any Future Obfuscation. There is no single
relationship between the reality of existence and the existence of
reality, but multiple relationships. This is a simple matter of
ontological-existential combinatorics in N-valued logic. For Aristotelian
logic in which N = 2: Existence is either real or unreal. Likewise,†
non-existence is either real or unreal. Furthermore, reality also either
exists or does not exist. Likewise, non-reality either exists or does not
exist.
</p>
<p>
However, in N-valued logic there may be gradations or degrees of
existence and/or non-existence, a quantized set of values approaching a
continuum as its limit. Ideally in this case the continuum may be mapped
upon various topological structures in N-dimensional hyperspace, in order
to maximize the degree of lucidity of the obfuscation.
</p>
<p>
William of Ockham's Razor, the principle proposed in the fourteenth
century, said "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate", which
translates as ”entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." By
contrast May-Tzu's Canon is more useful in metaphysics: "Words should not
be simplified unnecessarily," thereby reducing the danger of being
understood.
</p>
<p>
May-Tzu
</p>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-51127350535779277122007-10-08T19:42:00.001-07:002007-10-08T19:46:57.319-07:00Animal Freedom<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoRj3VAVtDl84kPNU6gmFZ9Ls1IPzRH4O-Jh3VpIyKsYJKXuX8_tYeflfbkp-zH5ZjRdti6yWBno6J4xmOAPMHEsTyBRB2oSmDRVN0TY9171FJr5qR9os67Agkpq6so7VXkpwHCkG2HQk/s1600-h/Jolanda+Dubbeldam.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoRj3VAVtDl84kPNU6gmFZ9Ls1IPzRH4O-Jh3VpIyKsYJKXuX8_tYeflfbkp-zH5ZjRdti6yWBno6J4xmOAPMHEsTyBRB2oSmDRVN0TY9171FJr5qR9os67Agkpq6so7VXkpwHCkG2HQk/s200/Jolanda+Dubbeldam.JPG" border="0" alt="Jolanda Dubbeldam" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5078949455521828658" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Jolanda%20Dubbeldam">Jolanda Dubbeldam</a>
</p>
<p>
I don’t remember what the dream was about, but the alarm honking turned it into a trip on a steamboat. Wide river, big boat – do steamboats actually honk like that? Switching off the noise, I face the familiar urge to roll over and ease back into warm sleep just this once ... what am I trying to prove, anyways. Getting up all alone at six on a Sunday morning, which also means, by the way, going to bed early alone without enjoying that glass of Chardonnay last night. You’d think I was an actual athlete training for the Olympics, instead of the middle-aged slow jogger that I am. Still. I open my eyes (sleep has escaped me, too much thinking already) and notice the gear I put out last night. Smart idea. Now I can just grab the stuff and sneak out of the bedroom without waking my husband, but more importantly, just seeing the well-worn actual running brand shoes with excellent mid-sole cushioning and support, not just any old sneakers, and the sweat-wicking top which chafes just a little under the armpits but only near the end of the run, well, yes, there’s nothing I’d rather be doing.
</p>
<p>
Light breakfast, just enough to fuel the run but not to nauseate. I find a bottle of my Gatorade of choice, pink, which does happen to be my favorite color though that is beside the point. The lighter the color, the lighter the taste. Some of those flavors are so strong they stick to your throat and teeth and tongue after just one sip, and there I’d go huffing and puffing and choking on Xtreme Orange for miles. No, pink is my flavor, mixed 50/50 with water for good measure. I fill up a bigger quart-size bottle with ice water to wait in a shady spot in the car until I get back from my run; by then the ice will have melted but hopefully the water still cool enough to enjoy. Nothing compares to it! Making it back to the parking lot, hot and sweaty and thirsty as hell, and then cracking open that bottle of water and drinking, drinking, drinking like there’s no tomorrow – tastes better than the classiest five-star champagne, I swear.
</p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaSBauZNY6Sf5GEqycFb1nyHqrtCEcKanlEwqDGZz0apAgU2L-_DyY2lw8dbeAsF6RmczxR82JzmvJgQmxZ5r7BXdxHqKfTfdRkkjoZlvwi0D5ZowMIPf4G7IstISKEuRrVjnB5d-tvAw/s1600-h/Hiking+in+the+hills+near+San+Diego.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaSBauZNY6Sf5GEqycFb1nyHqrtCEcKanlEwqDGZz0apAgU2L-_DyY2lw8dbeAsF6RmczxR82JzmvJgQmxZ5r7BXdxHqKfTfdRkkjoZlvwi0D5ZowMIPf4G7IstISKEuRrVjnB5d-tvAw/s400/Hiking+in+the+hills+near+San+Diego.jpg" border="0" alt="Jolanda hiking in the hills near San Diego" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5119162677747165442" /></a>
<span id="fullpost">
<p>
I drive the few miles to my trail. There is no one else around at this hour, as usual. A broken down truck the only other vehicle in the parking lot, but I’m pretty sure it was just sitting there empty last week, too. I step out of the car, and take a brief moment to engage with my inner quiet. Closed eyes. Perfect. The promise of another scorching summer day, but for now air still tinged with the coolness of night. A slight breeze like a whisper, stroking my face, raising the hairs on my arms in slight goose bumps. Quiet all around. No cars, no people, no dogs. Perfect.
</p>
<p>
Well! Let’s get this show on the road! I strap on my pink Gatorade, slip my car key onto my shoe lace and tie it down with a tight double knot. Check the knot again. I worry about losing that key somewhere along the way, because then what? Drag my poor exhausted body home along the
I-101? I think a huge bout of weeping would be more likely, and it’s hard to imagine how that would solve anything.
</p>
<p>
Starting is always the tough part. Brisk walking for a mile to warm up muscles and ease the heart into working harder, lungs into breathing deeper. I feel a little like a horse doing that trotting thing on a race track, you know, they’re going as fast as they can without actually breaking into a run but you can tell it’s driving them crazy and every once in a while one of them just can’t take it any more and off he goes galloping wildly, racing past the others, free at last. I never walk that full mile. Legs want to run. And there I go.
</p>
<p>
It takes a few minutes to settle into the rhythm that will take me out an hour and back an hour. My feet hit the ground as regularly as a clock ticking thump, thump, thump, thump and my breathing settles into rhythmic ins and outs. Not too fast. Going long today. My body finds its comfort zone and does its own thing, needing no instruction, unfettering the mind. I think of Aria sitting lazily by her bowl this morning, waiting for food as if nothing ever happened. I cuddled her tight before filling her bowl, annoying her by obviously not having my priorities straight (food! Give me food!) but, damn, I missed that silly animal. She was gone four whole days and yesterday we were still running all over the neighborhood hanging up flyers and asking people to check their garages, even though hope was running low. Then this morning, when I open the front door to leave, there she is, quietly sitting on the doorstep. She wanders in, cool as a cucumber and none the worse for wear, I guess just finished with whatever she needed to do and ready to come home. She paused on her way to the food bowl just long enough to rub along my legs. What a sweetheart. I'm glowing just thinking about her.
</p>
<p>
A loud cough. Danger. My body freezes to a halt before my mind catches up. My heart stops beating. In the tall yellow grass beside the trail I look into two golden eyes. A split second. Then the cougar turns and runs. My heart starts up again. My brain belatedly starts to work. What was it, what was it you were supposed to do when confronted by a cougar? Oh yeah, right, make yourself as tall as possible and make noise and make sure the animal has room to escape. I raise my arms and yell. And yell and yell and yell. Then I stop, though I keep my arms up. I’m not sure when it is OK to stop doing this. I know the cougar is gone, but I can't remember which way he went. Finally, I lower my arms.
</p>
<p>
I look across the wide field of low shrub and grass in front of me, hills off to the distance. It is kind of odd that I didn’t see the cougar run off much farther than I did, I really only saw him when he was two yards in front of me. It's like he disappeared into thin air. I know I am safe now. But I don’t know what to do next. I think I'd like to go forward and finish my run. Or would that be running towards danger? Or does it make any difference which way I go? I’m still facing the grass. I feel a deep revulsion at the idea of turning my back to it. But finally I accept that I can't just stand there all day. I decide to turn back towards the car, not because it makes any logical difference, but because I’m having a hard time thinking straight and for some reason it just seems like the right thing to do.
</p>
<p>
Legs start running. Not easing into the comfort of it anymore. I am tense, keep having to glance over my shoulder. I slow down a minute to pick up a branch and carry it with me - fat lot of good that's going to do me - I smirk at my pathetic attempt at fooling myself into feeling safe. I’m really relieved when I leave the fields behind me and the trail snakes into a street with houses, parking lot nearby. I drop the branch. When I reach the car, I lean my full body onto it, eyes closed, finally able to relax. So now, I wonder, will I ever be able to let go of this fear, or will I lose this thing that was all mine, the freedom and solitude and exhilaration and naturalness of this Sunday morning escape? I can’t tell. I guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens next week when the alarm starts its early morning honking.
</p>
</span>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-18610485624774767532007-10-04T19:20:00.000-07:002007-10-04T19:49:31.588-07:00Quantum Mechanics and Objective Reality<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCVK-Xf6ntkt10tRJqT0yn_Nz4SgKSICqT6XZm6KwzpXPSfC-YF_X80IyhsYzk-jp9jsq4XuizSiIo9oamA_nNWYSN1A4c3dZUh69BcWLiBIrDZHZklEdHCBbY5kHxDrdoi9oU3q4o6Zc/s1600-h/FrankLuger.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class=author src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCVK-Xf6ntkt10tRJqT0yn_Nz4SgKSICqT6XZm6KwzpXPSfC-YF_X80IyhsYzk-jp9jsq4XuizSiIo9oamA_nNWYSN1A4c3dZUh69BcWLiBIrDZHZklEdHCBbY5kHxDrdoi9oU3q4o6Zc/s200/FrankLuger.jpg" border="0" alt="Frank Luger headshot" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054489223893870818" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Frank%20Luger">Frank Luger</a>
</p>
<p>
The main features of quantum theory, such as the wave function, the uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality, indeterminacy, probabilistic behavior, exchange forces, spin, quarks and their various flavors and charms, etc. are so counterintuitive as to defy human intuition and common sense. It is often argued, that since they are abstractions, one way or another, maybe they are figments of overactive imaginations. Not quite, counters the theoretical physicist, because although there’s a tough road from mathematical modeling to scientific fact, there’s overwhelming experimental and other evidence in favor of quantum mechanics as objective reality.
</p>
<p>
In order to take a look at some of the considerations which allow one to state that the world at the tiny magnitudes of microphysics is as proposed by quantum theory, it may be instructive to deal with the wave function as one of the main representatives in question. Although a mathematical abstraction, the wave function corresponding to a physical system contains all the information that is obtainable about the system. For example, if a moving particle acted on by a force is represented by a wave function (psi), then measurement of a physical quantity, such as momentum, always yields an eigenvalue of the associated momentum operator. In general, the outcome of the measurement is not precisely predictable and is not the same for identically prepared systems; but each possible outcome, or eigenvalue, has a certain probability of occurring.
</p>
<p>
This probability is given by the squared modulus of the scalar product of the normalized wave function (psi), or state vector, and the eigenvector of the operator corresponding to that particular eigenvalue. Furthermore, not all operators representing physical quantities commute- that is, sometimes AB ≠ BA, where multiplication of the operators A and B corresponds to making two measurements in the order indicated. These unusual but unambiguous postulates, which associate probabilities with geometric properties of vectors in an abstract space, have great predictive and explanatory value and, at the same time, many implications that confound our intuition.
</p>
<p>
Because of the usefulness of the wave function in generating experimentally testable predictions, it appears that a mathematical abstraction here takes on a reality equivalent to that of concrete events, as envisioned by Pythagorean and Platonic philosophies. However, there is a direct connection between the abstraction and observable events, and there has not been much tendency in physics to place the wave function in some realm of ideal forms, platonic or otherwise.
</p>
<span id="fullpost">
<p>
A similar state of affairs already existed in classical electrodynamics, and some physicists remarked that Maxwell’s laws were nothing more than Maxwell’s equations. Perhaps because radiation always had been regarded as immaterial with wave properties, this point of view was not quite as disturbing as it became when matter waves had to be considered. In both cases, however, there does appear to be a problem in explaining how mathematical symbolism can do so much.
</p>
<p>
Platonic implications can be avoided if we look more closely at the actual, concrete role of the wave function in the theory. If viewed as a conceptual tool, rather than something given, the idea of a wave function containing information about observable events is not so strange. The meaning of the wave function is defined by its role in the theory, which after all is a matter of theorists interacting with events. A clue to this purely conceptual, computational role is the fact that a wave function can be multiplied by an arbitrary phase factor without changing its physical significance in any way. Also, the fact that it is a complex-valued function discourages one from interpreting it as something with spatial and temporal wave properties.
</p>
<p>
As the search for causes has diminished in modern physics, the success of microphysics in explaining the properties of complex structures such as atoms, molecules, crystals, and metals has increased markedly at the same time. If causality is conceived, as it once was, in terms of collisions among particles with well-defined trajectories, then it has no meaning at the quantum level. However, a remarkable consistency in the evolution of identical structures with characteristic properties is apparent in nature. Quantum mechanics goes far toward explaining how these composite systems are built up from more elementary components. Although the once predominant mechanistic view of colliding particles is no longer tenable, its decline has been accompanied by success in the actual achievement of its original aims.
</p>
<p>
Terms such as causality and determinism still are used occasionally by physicists, but their connotations are quite different from what they were in earlier times. The formalism of quantum theory implies that determinism characterizes states, but not observables. The state of the system described by a wave function (psi) evolves in time in a strictly deterministic manner, according to the Schrödinger equation, provided that a measurement is not made during that period of time. This usage of determinism actually is equivalent to the statement that the Schrödinger equation is a first-order differential equation with respect to time.
</p>
<p>
In contrast, if at some instant a measurement of a physical quantity is made, the possible values that might be obtained are represented by a probability distribution. Furthermore, a measuring instrument introduces an uncontrollable disturbance into the system, and, afterwards, that system is in a different state that is not precisely predictable. This situation led Max Born (1882-1970) to make a famous statement that the motion of particles conforms to the laws of probability, but the probability itself is propagated in accordance with the law of causality. The initial astonishment produced by this unforeseen turn of events was shortly followed by an even greater astonishment when these unconventional ideas proved to be extremely workable in practice.
</p>
<p>
Consider more closely the role of causality and of probability in the theory. The relationship (psi)1 → (psi)2, where (psi)1 and (psi)2 are states at successive instants in time, is completely determined in the theory, provided no measurement takes place during the interval. Moreover, if a measurement is made at some instant, the relationships (psi)1 → f(x) and (psi)2 → g(x), where f(x) and g(x) are probability distributions of an observable, also are completely determined. The new and strange features of the theory are embodied in the facts that (a) these probability distributions, in general, have nonzero variance, and (b) if the relation (psi)1 → f(x) is in fact exhibited by making a measurement, then the relation (psi)1 → (psi)2 no longer holds.
</p>
<p>
It is difficult to grasp intuitively that the probabilities referred to are those of measures that might be obtained on an individual system using a perfectly reliable instrument and seemingly come from nowhere. Expressed mathematically, the only appropriate probability space corresponding to the probability distribution of a quantum mechanical observable is provided by the real line, its measurable subsets, and the probability measure determined by the wave function; and that structure is not, as is usually the case, induced by an underlying probability space having physical significance. Despite intensive search over many decades, no such underlying probability space has ever been found, and it is now generally agreed that one does not exist. This search in fact resembled somewhat the frustrating attempts in the XIXth century to find an ether, a hypothetical universal space-filling medium propagating radiation.
</p>
<p>
Nevertheless, when matters are expressed as above, it appears that quite a lot about the theory is deterministic. Furthermore, this viewpoint discourages the tendency to confuse indeterminacy with lack of ability of scientists effectively to make contact with events. Probability distributions of measurements are objective, concrete things. Determinism fails when applied to the concept of an elementary corpuscle simultaneously having a definite position and a definite momentum, conditions never observed experimentally.
</p>
<p>
Quantum theory, as emphasized previously, was applied with excellent results to a broad range of phenomena; for example, the periodic table of the elements at last became understandable, and the foundations of all inorganic chemistry, and much organic chemistry and solid state physics were firmly established. Contrary to the expectations of some critics, the theory definitely has not encouraged a view of the world ruled by a capricious indeterminacy, but, on the contrary, has greatly enchanced the coherence and explanatory power of science.
</p>
<p>
Still, the above turn of events in the age-old problem of causality had not been anticipated. The fact that the implications of the theory conflicted in such a radical way with previous philosophical views was a departure from tradition that probably to this date has not been fully assimilated.
</p>
<p>
Eventually, one may hope, concepts such as causality, system, interaction, and interdependence will be extended and enriched by the findings of quantum physics. Perhaps we are already beginning to see this happen and to appreciate that the new viewpoint does not entail as much of a loss as we once believed. In both classical physics and quantum physics a list of well-defined dynamical variables is associated with each system, and in some respects the quantum mechanical description by state vectors is analogous to a phase-space representation in classical statistical mechanics. Formally, the dynamical variables play a different role in the two theories, but in both cases their specification exhausts the observable properties of the system. The probabilistic aspects of quantum theory, as stressed before, certainly do not imply an inability to find lawfulness and orderliness in nature.
</p>
<p>
Although quantum mechanical predictions of, for example, position are inherently probabilistic, in many instances a particle is sufficiently localized that probabilities of it appearing outside a restricted range are essentially zero, that is, the dispersion of the distribution is small. It becomes meaningful, for example, to speak of shells and subshells in atomic structure. Overall, it appears that abandonment of the rather limited classical cause-and-effect scheme is a minimal loss compared to the far greater gains achieved by the theory as a whole.
</p>
<p>
Like many ideas in quantum theory, the celebrated Heisenberg uncertainty principle becomes less mysterious if examined in its concrete role in the theory. The uncertainty principle is not an insight which preceded the theory, but is built into its structure, that is, it can be derived from the abstract formalism. Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and its success in accounting for experimental results came first; the uncertainty principle and its implications then were recognized.
</p>
<p>
Essentially, this principle means that the dispersions, or variances, of probability distributions of noncommuting observables are constrained by one another, or, alternatively, that a function and its Fourier transform cannot both be arbitrarily sharp. The physical significance of this result is that measurements of certain pairs of observed quantities- such as position and momentum, or time and energy- cannot simultaneously be made arbitrarily accurate. The principle has been confirmed, many times, by an overwhelming mass of evidence. Accordingly, the principle is an objective property of events that must be confronted in future advances of our understanding of the physical world. Much the same is true about all the other main features of quantum theory.
</p>
<p>
Although quantum mechanics and the blurred mode of existence that it reveals represent current frontiers in the direction of the infinitesimally small, it is generally acknowledged that this is not the final answer. Quantum reality is reality, to be sure, but it is still very much a virtual reality inasmuch as it refers to states of affairs relative to Man. As such, it is reasonable to expect that it has a source and a destination, being perhaps an integral albeit temporal phenomenon of an underlying ultimate reality. That is, quantum mechanics is objective reality; but it remains to be seen where it comes from and where it goes. However, that’s another story.
</p>
</span>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4507789180853988507.post-57156238920161231312007-10-03T09:16:00.000-07:002007-10-03T09:37:34.126-07:00Chess and Aptitudes<p>
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/1600/Albert2003.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" class="author" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/3227/550267233990965/200/Albert2003.jpg" border="0" alt="Albert Frank Headshot" /></a>
by <a href="http://reason-and-rhyme.blogspot.com/search/label/Albert%20Frank" alt="Albert Frank articles">Albert Frank</a>
</p>
<p>
I very briefly introduce you to an experiment that was performed
in 1973.
</p>
<p>
Very often one hears statements such as, "You need to be
intelligent to play chess," "Chess fosters
intelligence,"… All this is too vague.
</p>
<p>
In 1973, in co-operation with the Psychology Department of the
"Université Nationale du
Zaïre" at Kisangani, I undertook an experiment
to clarify these issues.
</p>
<p>
It should be stated that in many countries there is a "Chess
Class" taught in primary and secondary schools by the faculty.
This makes it extremely difficult to obtain unbiased statistics
since there is a general familiarity with chess.
</p>
<p>
As an initial step, I received permission from the Government of
Zaire to alter the curriculum of three classes of the fourth year
curriculum for an entire year in a major secondary school of
Kisangani. (Belgian school system class denominations are assumed
here.) In those three classes, two out of a total of seven hours
of mathematics taught per week were replaced by two hours of
chess instruction.
</p>
<span id="fullpost">
<p>
There were a total of six classes each with 30 students in the
fourth year in this institution. So now they were divided into
two groups : The three classes in my "experimental" group
(A) ; and the three others in the "control" group (B).
</p>
<p>
I was allowed to administer the following battery of intelligence
related tests:
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>
the Belgian version of the G.A.T.B. ("General Aptitude Test
Battery")
</li>
<li>
the P.M.A. ("Primary mental abilities" by Thurstone)
</li>
<li>
the D.A.T. ("Differential Aptitude Test" by Bennet, Seashore
and Wesman)
</li>
<li>
the D2 (Brieckenkamp)
</li>
<li>
the Rorschach.
</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
</p>
<p>
Some preliminary remarks should be made before going over to the
description of the results of the experiment.
</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>
Knowing the degree to which the tests employed were
culturally fair to the tested persons is not absolutely
necessary, since the aim was merely to compare groups A and B
for whom there were no significant cultural differences.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
No student in either group had ever even heard of chess,
which is a very useful feature. Ideally, there could have
been a third group, but you can't have it
all!
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
There were seven hours of instruction weekly (mathematics +
chess for group A, exclusively mathematics for group B). The
instruction was provided by French speaking teachers
— two Belgian teachers for mathematics and
myself for chess.
</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>
Experiment phases:
<ol>
<li>
<p>
At the beginning of the year, all students (A and B groups)
were administered the battery of tests described above. Both
groups scored approximately the same.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
Whereas group B was taught mathematics 7 hours a week, group
A was given the same program in five hours a week, and
received two hours a week of chess instruction. (Wednesday
11-12 a.m. and Saturday 7-8 a.m..)
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
Instruction involved testing of subject
matter. This included the chess lessons, just like the others
mathematics lectures. In group A chess tests and exams
accounted for 2/7<sup>th</sup>s of the usual
mathematics curriculum score, and actual mathematics skills
accounted for the fractional part, 5/7 of the total
score.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
At the end of the year, all students of both groups were
given the battery of intelligence-related tests again. The
students of the experimental group A also took an exam to
test the chess level reached. The items of this exam were
mostly written by Doctor Max Euwe, former chess world
champion and chairman of the F.I.D.E.
(Fédération internationale du Jeu
d'Echecs).
</p>
</li>
</ol>
</p>
<p>
The results obtained:
</p>
<p>
Among tested intelligence-related aptitudes, the two groups
differed significantly, with the experimental group A scoring
significantly better than the control group. The "arithmetic",
with a confidence level of 0.95 and "verbal
logic" (most often measured by the identification of synonyms or
antonyms) with a confidence level of 0.99.
</p>
<p>
These findings answer some of the questions that were being
investigated. But why verbal logic? … There
is still no answer.
</p>
<p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>
The experiment also enabled us to answer questions with a
view to delineating, by taking the results of the aptitude
test into account, the ability to enhance chess
performance… but this is beyond the scope
of this summary.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
The students of both groups received special attention till
the end of their secondary studies, i.e. two years after the
end of the experiment. The students of the experimental group
obtained significantly better results in the long term, both
in their mathematics and in their French abilities.
</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>
The complete study description is given in the
book <i>CHESS AND
APTITUDES</i>, Albert Frank, American
Chess Foundation, December 1978.
</p>
<p>
A technical summary (in French) has been published under the
title "Aptitudes et apprentissage du jeu
d'échecs au Zaïre" in the magazine
"Psychopathologie Africaine,"
1979, XV, 1, 81-98.
</p>
</span>dharmabrucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08591716014384584725noreply@blogger.com1