Allegory of the cave

background: i'm having my students do an art project where they re-envision the allegory of the cave in their own way. i wanted to show them an example of a project, so michael and wrote a correspondence poem pretty quickly today. i wrote from the perspective of a woman whose lover left the cave and comes back he wrote from perspective of the lover who left the cave. i hope we do more deez.

Cave
(by kim and michael)

When you left for the

edge of dread you

became a monster in the

shape of a man.

A once beautiful mouth

now emitting a mad web

in the shape

of a thought,

and a stream

that smells like

her mouth

and stings my eyes.

You call her Truth—I can’t echolocate

this name stinks of sorrow

and is shaped like nothing.

You see

 and seeing

nothing in this seed

that is our home.

You call this seed now a shell

and you call me a shell in the shape

of a person. 

do you not remember our first shadow

and cool dark gods gliding across our eyes?

reverberating in their unintelligible god-voice

And you, cool eyed and clever, saying

What is this if this is not love?

 ----------------------------------

--That language was a dialect called metaphor. You said, tell me the truth, so I lied. Though even then I could not love you, my eyes so dimmed by the liminal light of darkness unanchored, of transitive verbs, of other women whose names were Truth and Light and Capitalized Indulgence but whose praxes unbinded our hearts before binding them. Wisdom languishes in the reassurance of retrospect. You said: are we there yet? and I, holding you, said: no. It is not darkness which denudes a place of its light. It is time spent in darkness. Having not seen for so long one cannot be expected suddenly to see. But aphaeresis is not negation, does not denude a word of its light, and so only now I can tell you the truth in words which is this: you are beautiful. Like this thing called ocean. Like this thing called metaphor. Like this thing called bird which is not a shadow but casts one, so that even in that darkness I still can think of you.





 

Isthmus

A CNF essay I wrote got published in Issue 1 of the Devilfish Review. Checkem out, if you're bored.

http://devilfishreview.com/

50/50

"Florence was the home of Giovanni Boccaccio, born in 1313, author of many works, including The Dacameron, a cycle of a hundred stories supposedly told by a group of ten young people over the course of ten days in a luxurious retreat from the horrors of Florence... . Boccaccio called his work a commedia, which in the parlance of the time meant 'any play or narrative poem in which the main characters manage to avert an impending disaster and have a happy ending'"

bodies detached from distant

hinges muse over

what the taupe and blue

mid-scale damask

shows once rubbed

raw.

the wonder is whether the tuft and husk

prove geomantic or

peel back

to a panel equally

aritificial.

almost

one might imagine the two toying

with buckles

and tongue-thighs,

heavy with something

deep .

call it what you want

in the spine:

a pommel

parabola

some last fiber of felt, old

and itching--

a thing not ever,

if honest,

capillary.

and,

if you are honest

with yourself,

you, whose thoughts remain in words

find no chapel in here

I vocalized eccentricities I wanted you to remember

while I watched you fold paper cranes.

White space/Erasure

I never know

and how

you say

but you dont.

get .

sick.

this is unclean

and i eat out of the bowls.

The truth is

My first time I used an earring.

and every time that i

would

i kept secrets.

the word is platino. the heaviest.

like the ankle, it is (con)vexed.

I believed you about the

aurora borealis

but nothing else.

and

all along,

I kept your cold.

my dent de lion.

What you should

no,

is

You

will

mat fibers,

and

you say

You’ll be

fine.

Why was six afraid of seven?

It wasn't. Numbers are not sentient and thus, incapable of feeling fear.

(from anti-joke.com)

An excerpt from Susan Buck-Morss's essay, "Universal History"

A final image, a third rebus, is appropriate. Adam Smith...wrote that the work of slaves was dearer to their masters than that of freemen, and he condemned slavery as an intolerable obstacle to human progress. Yet he was fully aware of the enormous profits of the sugar plantations--particularly in Barbados and Saint-Domingue--despite the fact that all the work was done by slaves. Was it not, then, a case of disavowal that Smith's only weakness was consuming lumps of sugar? An eyewitness recalls:

'We shall never forget one particular evening when [Adam Smith] put an elderly maiden lady who presided at the tea-table to sore confusion by neglecting utterly her invitation to be seated, and walking round and round the circle, stopping ever and anon to steal a lump from the sugar basin, which the venerable spinster was at length constrained to place on her own knee, as the only method of securing it from his uneconomical depredations. His appearance mumping the eternal sugar was something indescribable.'

Rococo by The Arcade Fire

An elegy:

Anti-logic is not alogic,

we are certain

of nothing

outside
our own falsifications.

---

I forgot about the wind here up until this morning when I was walking and thinking of you and the sun revealed itself in a compelling way to my eyes. It was orange and heavy with atmospheric dust and across the lake the snap-hooks fastened to the flagpole banged incessantly against the aluminum. They clanged (clung), they did, and their tautophony reminded me of tired thirsty kings in Tartarus who roll big rocks and can’t alleviate their thirst.

The rest of the day and every day all day I hear rattling bugs like birds dried to skeletons and sound boxes, and I remember how miraculously quiet it is in November when hearts stop and everything crystallizes. I choose to believe it's kind of God to kill his insects like he does with the cold-- freezing being one of the nicest ways to die.

Speaking of birds, I get bothered when I think about the way you called her your heron. The only bird I’ve ever been is Isis in 5th grade, when I made myself wings from bed sheets and glued feathers for a collaborative project on Egypt. Someone else’s mother did my makeup and made me a necklace out of felt and plastic jewels and I thought I was as beautiful as Cleopatra: the one with no hair on her knuckles.

The other sound I hear a lot is the generator across the street which is really just a big mechanical cricket on the college’s engineering building. There they teach my friend nathaniel that objects only work one way with one intended purpose, and they don’t work backward. You can’t push a rope, he tells me, and he pops his ear with the knuckle of his forefinger. I understand that it’s beside the point, but if you dipped the rope in water and froze it, I think you could push it.

Anyway, I hope you aren’t kept awake by the sound of insects more consistent than obsession. Last week I stayed up reading about Isis and her lover Osiris who was cut up in 14 pieces and thrown into the river. She spent along time trying to find him. I like to imagine her waist deep, sifting through reeds and silt beds, lunging at his pieces flowing further down the current.

Feedback?

....

5 New, great words:

1. ratiocinate

2. sfumato

3. transom

4. internecine

5. apposite

4 Staple Foods

1. Sun Chips

2. Popcicles

3. Fruit Smoothies

4. Leftover Pizza

3 Annoyances:

1. Cicadas

2. Androcentrists who are ignorant and detached enough to call the oppression of women 'an unfortunate thing' (and link it to men not stepping up to their biblical, masculine role)

3. Ockham's Razor

2 Favorite Tragic Figures

1. John Proctor

2. Lady Jane Grey

1 Proclamation:

1. I'm no longer using microwaves. I'm scared of them.

What is a Prijatel?

"What is a Prijatel, you might ask? Prijatel is the accumulation of all things sarcastic into a hodgepodge of sexiness "

-Nick Lyon.

Yep.

And like, colors, you know?

From John Olson's article "Strange Matter" in the The American Scholar...

Mass is not what it seems. This is because we inhabit a world of weight, density, texture, and tangibility. The realities produced by calculus and differential equations make no sense to us, literally. Our perceptions are keyed to specific sensations. Roughness, weightiness, smoothness, sharpness, dullness. Foods are sweet or bitter or a combination of the two. Some things are warm and dry, others cold and wet. We cannot conceive of a reality not immersed in such responses. Not without faith in numbers. Trajectories and orbital mechanics. Energy and force. Momentum and inertia. Some of these are available to our senses. We all know what velocity feels like. But when someone tells us that there is more space in an ingot of steel than there is steel, we balk at the truthfulness of such a statement. We might readily agree, based on what we have learned in science. But it still seems beyond the reach of imagining. Because if there is more space than steel in an ingot of steel, what does that say about us? Are we ghosts? Clouds of atoms? Symphonies of molecules? Waves of light and radiant heat? All improbable, all incredible revelations. But the fact remains: a three-ton ingot of steel is mostly space. If an atom were the size of a 14 story building, the nucleus would be a grain of salt in the middle of the seventh floor.

Two instances come to mind: Dr. Samuel Johnson dismissing George Berkeley's ideas of immaterialism with his famous "I refute Berkeley thus," and then kicking a rock; and Jack Kerouac's address to an audience at the Hunter College Playhouse on November 6, 1958, during a symposium titled "Is There a Beat Generation?" It was there that Keroauc said, "We should be wondering tonight, 'Is there a world?' But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I'm walkin' on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you'll find out."

Kerouac and Berkeley were right. Johnson's rock was essentially a phantasmal, a cloud of subatomic particles. He was kicking a dream.

An excerpt from my assigned sixth-grade journal

If I could be any age I would be 21. I would be 21 because I would be able to drive, I would be an adult and I can live on my own.

The only downside of 21 is you are grown-up and so are your friends, so you might not get to see them as much as when you were a kid. Plus you have to make an important discision of what you want to be when you grow up. I want to be one of the following: singer/songwriter, author, actress, teacher, journalist, photographer, or acting coach. I COULD be all of those things, but not really. My friend Maureen wants to be a pharmisist. She wants to be Maureen the famous pharmisist. We always joke about it.

I want to be a singer/songwriter, or author. I want to create books or songs about racialisum, drugs, alchol, disease, and world peace. I think maybe people will listen to me, because I am famous. I think its a stupid reason for someone to listen. We should listen to everyone.

These subjects (prejudice, drugs, achol, disease, and world peace) are very important to me and then after I am famous, I'll create commercials so people will send money to a special organization for disease and cancer. Alchol is an important issue because of drunk driving. I want to do commercials about drunk driving to prevent people from driving drunk. Its almost impossible to prevent prejudice, but drugs I would give money to programs like DARE.

I think I like being a kid more then an adult, when you grow up you can't do a lot of fun things or anything. Yes, there is a downside to not being able to drive and having a bed time, and not being able to see rated R movies. But being grown up is worse. I would like to be my sisters age (19) because she told me when she is at college she can do almost anything she wants, but she must wake up really really early. I think its also KIND OF cool to be an adult because you can have kids and get married. I guess thats also kind of cool.

Summer 2010: an update

1. Metaphysics: No.

2. Writing: No.

3. Reading: Yes.

4. Abscess: Yes.

5. Peanut Butter Banana Milkshake: Yes.

6. Vegan: No.

7. Radiolab: Yes.

8. The Yeah Yeah Yeah's "Hysteric" (Acoustic Version): Yes.

This isn't me.

For Those Who Live Alone

Almighty God, whose Son had nowhere to lay his head:

Grant that those who live alone may not be lonely in their

solitude, but that, following his steps, they may find

fulfillment in loving you and their neighbors; through Jesus

Christ our Lord. Amen

From the Book of Common Prayer

Something Recent Enough

161 miles divided by 60 means 2 hours and 41 minutes until they reach Chicago, if they stay a steady 60. Ben has been averaging 72, but this all happened before they missed I-80, when the sunset had still offered reading light.

She tries to concentrate on the essay, but she's absent. She stares at the waist high fences along the highway; a thin line that separates rural and road. With the tufts of husk and trash woven in the wire she practices geomancy, privately. She dances with the white plastic bags that have snagged themselves on the barbs. She turns to Kate and asks what she thinks the fences are for. Kate says, 'Probably to keep coyotes out of the fields.'

It makes her think about when she was little, when her father joked about a mangled coyote lying in the highway margin. "Look, Jones," her father said to her "look at that dog sleeping on the side of the road." She most vividly remembers it's unshut mouth. Second to that she swears she remembers a flick of its tail, a slow inhale. It's unlikely; they wouldve been moving too fast to see those things, but still she keeps them there, in her memory.

She sticks her fingers in her ears and tries to go back to her reading:

"For everyone (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own, which retracts and discolors the light of nature; owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature or his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed or in a mind indifferent and settled; or the like. So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in face a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance. Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world."

She skips and underlines "The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it."

When she looks up again, they are passing a big white truck. She smiles up to a hat and a pair of sunglasses. Her uncle is a trucker and though she doesnt see him very often, she sees the profession in his disposition. He is always roaming, always restless, prone to shutting himself up in his cartesian mental space. He never overstays his welcome: always tired. The trucker returns her gesture, giving a quick smirk before looking back to the road.

In the margin of her book she writes, "Similar to Aquinas- errors of judgment come when the intellect and the will are incongruent. (Intellect, uncorrupted, Will, corrupted)"

The white plastic bags reach toward the farmland. They long to drape themselves over neuronic power lines. They long to lay with one another on fresh earth, to explore this unfamiliar universe that is the rural. She turns to Kate and asks, "do you think maybe they put them up to protect the rabbits from the freeway? "

"The fences?"

She nods.

Kate laughs. "So they can be hit by the tractors?"

She chooses to believe the question isn’t rhetorical, but still, she does not answer it; she just waits for another mile marker. The truth is--and she knows it--she is too superstitious and stubborn. She can't stop believing that coyote really did move.