Thunder echoes emptily down walls of city. L’Effet de pluie smears, grays it hastens_ etches figures dashing towards dithered awnings.
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Home > Monthly Archives: August 2015
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These East Coach beaches sleep under mists of sameness. North to South. An opiate syringe. Zarathustra, dreaming, saw an eternity of returning: What begins as the rites freedom_ pot, condoms, kegs in trash cans_ in the end is willess recurrence, a ritual of paperbacks and sand toys in the trenchant morning. And like videotape or prophesy, the strand frays in each retelling. So in time we forget what we sought or how we came to doubt these vague attempts at reclamation: Sand retreats. Dunes crumble. The houses fall to sea. Yet we return past the flatland soy fields, down the pine-lined corridors. We return under the jumbled coastal signage, power lines and cable crisscross. We return over the blazing steppes of sand to towel plot, sand chair or beach tent. We return to find returning has changed us. Barnacled, waterworn, like something the sea has thrown up upon its littered selvage_ so much like the old thing but somehow unworkable_ We have been rusted to postures of recline, staring oceanward, each face stamped, one after the other, with the same searching squint.
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Dawn. Mother went to the window, left hand palm up, fingers curled, as if begging alms of the whetted light.
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In the year 7,000 BCE, Jericho was the largest city on the planet—its population a whopping 2,000 souls.
Babylon, legend of exile and abandon, wouldn’t crack the top two hundred U.S. cities today. Its population was about 100,000—the same as South Bend, Indiana.
Ancient Rome at its height was as populous as modern day Dallas, Texas.
Yet somehow Jericho, Babylon and Rome are bigger than South Bend or Dallas. They have imaginative bigness. We see them: Israelites circle and trumpet. Hammurabi and Caesar Augustus stride in splendor. They swell, thrive, crumble and fall.
If the king’s pace was the measure of a yard, our dreaming marks the city.
Take New York. It hasn’t been the world’s largest city in decades. Yet it enjoys an imaginative station unattained by Jakarta, Manila and Seoul.
New York is a planet pulling in the best at everything—business, law, letters, the arts—in the relentless search for money, fame, accolades. For bigness.
The small are pulled toward the large. But unlike gravity, the pull of Gotham is psychic. Dreamers leave Muskogee and seek their measure in Manhattan.
The small make the big; the big defines the small.
//On Smallness_3//
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Here is an empty shelf. The shelf is in me. I am the shelf. Its emptiness Is an offering. For you.
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Not far from Karlsplatz
I stooped on a coping
and
looking up,
I found at last
an analphabetic,
an
almost painless
aloneness.
Up there.
A billboard word_
Teutonic, looped, globby_
I could almost understand.
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passion (n) : naïve fervor : a dulcet form of lust and hatred : an HR buzzword (meaningless) : self-deception
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One sodden port call in Faliraki years ago, I put my finger on top of a piece of exposed rebar. “This is the most important thing in the universe!”
Pugs, my buddy, said this was stupid. And it was—a bunch of bleary nonsense.
But then again, part of me meant it. Brain full of wine, my attention had collapsed in layers until, through the periscope of inebriation, I could make out only one thing at a time.
And there was this rusty length of reinforcement bar, sticking out of the hotel roof.
Why was it there? Did this rebar, like those houses in Palestine, presage upper floors built for future generations? Or was it slipshod construction—a needless hazard waiting to maim a child?
Or did the importance of it come from being part of the great ever-moving? Like the blades of grass upon which angels blow, or the sparrows counted by their heavenly father, was this bit of rebar a logged coordinate in God’s counted universe?
Or, more improbably yet, could this rebar matter without any explanation at all, without the actuaries of heaven, or even the brief plaudits of a drunken sailor?
//On Smallness_4//
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charity (n) : the hand that watches itself : automatic deduction : an approximate goodness (see also advice) : a tax write-off
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