“It is a mistake to think of the goal of philosophy as controlling emotion. The goal is to preserve emotion. The sage creates a space inside where hope, anger, innocence and desire are preserved from the treachery of experience.”
– Anton Lucash, 1972
Yet again,
loneliness
has spoiled
the gift of
solitude.
Albertina Chandelier
obverse (n) : off the hot pavement : i unstuck a swallow : topside feathered : the obverse hollow
“What could be more leveling and mundane than bill time? An afternoon writing checks for water, electricity, phone and insurance and any remaining pretense that I have been elevated by my ‘art’ to some higher plane has been washed away. By the time I’ve licked the last envelope and put the letters in the mailbox and raised the red flag, though, a poem or some morsel of a story has slipped sideways into my mind. It grows bigger as I come back down the drive—like this passage—tempting, rounded, elusive. No, writing has not elevated me, but rather it has connected me to something essential, something (almost) hidden in the day-to-day world around me. It is the method by which I have lived with the mundane, or better—how I’ve discovered within the mundane something always giving, something always extraordinary.”
– Anda Boyle, 1993
affront (n) : affront hides a back— : a craven arrow shower. : intended or unintended. : I’m sorry I hurt you.
This is the famed pale blue dot—the pixel seen from space when Voyager turned one last baleful glance toward home before slipping into the cold purgatory of drifting beyond.
Lay in the Carl Sagan voice-over, the Cosmos soundtrack. These sounds, like Catholic hymns or cicada dusk in Pennsylvania, were integral to the shaping of my wandering, self-flagellating, sometimes awestruck, always agnostic mind.
Voyager was built to drift forever, to seek, but to never find. In Star Trek, she is saved by a higher power. An alien race equips the probe with the means to know everything, to swallow worlds in the gullet of her imagination.
Me, a human, burdened either by my reptile brain or the stain of sin, I am left to listen to Pachelbel or Vangelis and experience the tingling simulacrum of insight—that expansive feeling of revelation full fire but lacking, painfully, in details.
This is metaphor of smallness.
Standing on Earth’s edge, I see in the black waters of night the light of a billion worlds. I know enough of science and circumstance to understand I will never reach them. And what remains of my religion are prayers against this darkness.
//On Smallness/5//
ampersand (v.t.) : to conjoin by shortcuts. : to add a partner but not a corner office. : to drop a sign where a word would do.
“All art is political, even art that pretends not to be. For what is apolitical is consensual. It condones the status quo. Or if it is accepted indifferently by the dominant class, it is the status quo.”
– Anton Lucash, 1968