Athot & lotsa quotes

(Diagram from a scientific pamphlet showing how beams from the sun interact with wind-water jinns in a standard crucifix.)

Dearest diary,

I don’t even need to sleep anymore.

I wonder how much uglier it’s all going to get in the U.S. eventually. Everyone remembers the Super Disaster. At the same time, no one remembers the Super Disaster. If you look back through history at other countries and nations…

Certain poets in ancient Atlantis could see the inevitable doom on the horizon. Nowadays, we call these souls prophets. But they didn’t possess any more magic powers than your average U.S. citizen; they just paid attention to things that were able to be observed.

I don’t feel like writing today. Why am I writing? Don’t punish yourself, Bry. It’s not your fault that you were born. You don’t have to pay back the world for… what. What’d I do that’s so troublesome that it requires a fee-for-damages? I don’t own a high-performance four-wheel-drive vehicle, because I prefer to walk or bike. I end up eating no meat, because I prefer other forms of sustenance.

Trucks and meat came to mind because I was trying to think of anti-planetary actions, and I have been told that this climate chaos that everyone laments is exacerbated most by those two industries: animals and autobots. (Sorry about that last term: I just wanted to avoid writing "-mobiles" because of the havoc that that would have wreaked on my syllable count.) According to Wikipedia:

Autobots are a fictional team of sentient robots from the planet Cybertron led by Optimus Prime.

But let me drop the horseless carriage problem and focus solely on foodstuffs. This is a cooking show, after all. Here’s Ralph Waldo Emerson, from The American Scholar:

We all know, that as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge.

And in Part Two of yesterday’s entry I mulled semi-coherently about a secret agent codenamed The Baptizer. But since, at the moment, all I care about is proper dress and diet, here’s 3:4 from The Gospel According to Matthew:

John had his raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.

Not grass and shoe-broth. But all of us are vegetarians by default; for the more of a prophet you are, the less of a profit you earn. And we never race motorcars. Only dromedaries.

Apparently the Web Muse currently has no messages to transmit via my Chip Log. And still I feel like I owe the world a debt. I guess I’ll drone about my day.

This morning I awoke to a light that was shining, although it was still dark out. The light was coming from the sky; I don’t know what was causing it – perhaps it was those strangers that visit every night in their glowing saucers…

Again, my apologies: Now I’m plagiarizing “Mr. Spaceman,” a song by the U.S. rock band The Byrds. (Back to Wikipedia:)

Initially written by band member Jim McGuinn as a “melodramatic screenplay,” it evolved into a whimsical meditation on the existence of extraterrestrial life.

The reason I have been writing with such an idiotic tone is that my sweetheart had two appointments this morning—first, the dentist; then, the doctor—so I was nervous. I’m always sure that she’ll come home with bad news; or, worse, that she won’t come home at all, and I’ll receive a call from the clinic, whose representative will explain to me that the nurse gave my sweetheart too much laughing gas and thus she will never again behave like a human: for humankind is to remain always downcast and mournful; only the Master of Heaven laughs all the time.

The first appointment was to fill a cavity in one of her fangs. The second appointment was for a routine physical exam. Ultimately, my sweetheart made it home just fine; and she claims that everything went smoothly and that there are no problems: she’s got a “clean bill of health.” But I’m still skeptical.

Anyway, we had a little time before our allotment of wage labor was scheduled, so we decided to ride our bikes to the park and read from our backpack of books. I’ll just fill up the rest of this entry with quotes...

Having recently finished the 77 Dream Songs of John Berryman, we moved on to another writer who was recently mentioned by my main man M.P. Powers, and that is the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. We’ve only just begun to read him, so I can only offer a couple short snippets. Already I love his work. Suffusing much of what we enjoyed this afternoon was the best type of play between gloom and glare:

It was suddenly dark, like a downpour.
I stood in a room that contained every moment—a butterfly museum.

And the sun still as strong as before.
Its impatient brushes were painting the world.

That’s from “Secrets on the Way,” translated by Robin Fulton. And these next lines are from “Track,” translated by Robert Bly; I’m fascinated by the way that Tranströmer makes even the state of being sick seem somewhat alluring.

As when a man goes so deep into his dream
he will never remember that he was there
when he returns again to his room.

Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness
that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm,
feeble and cold on the horizon.

And, lastly for T.T., here are the end lines of “Kyrie,” in Robin Fulton’s translation:

Slowly, slowly until morning puts its rays in the locks
and the doors of darkness open.

Another book—The World Doesn’t End by Charles Simic—was recently recommended to me by a strange and mysterious force known only by the codename Speaking Mute (see the comment section of the entry that I posted the day after John Ashbery and Twin Peaks expired in tandem). This brief collection of prose poems was like candy to me, everything is so likeable, so loose playful creative and childlike in the best way. Even reading it slowly and savoring it, we were able to finish the book in a couple sittings. I also checked out Simic’s Selected Early Poems at the behest of the same booming voice from the unknown depths, and now I’m really looking forward to diving into that; but we haven’t started it yet, so here I’ll give a few of my favorite little parts from the former title.

First I love the way the poem on page 26 ends – in just under twenty-five words, Simic captures a temperament that I have seen pervade the entire life of some individuals:

The question marks had valentines carved on their trunks so you wouldn’t look up and notice the ropes.
     Greasy ropes with baby nooses.

And I like this two-paragraph poem on the very next page:

     Everything’s forseeable. Everything has already been foreseen. What has been fated cannot be avoided. Even this boiled potato. This fork. This chunk of dark bread. This thought too. . . .
     My grandmother sweeping the sidewalk knows that. She says there’s no god, only an eye here and there that sees clearly. The neighbors are too busy watching TV to burn her as a witch.

Also I like this one, from page 57:

     Ambiguity created by a growing uncertainty of ante­cedents bade us welcome.
     “The Art of Making Gods” is what the advertisement said. We were given buckets of mud and shown a star atlas. “The Minotaur doesn’t like whistling,” someone whispered, so we resumed our work in silence.
     Evening classes. The sky like a mirror of a dead beauty to use as a model. The spit of melancholia’s plague carrier to make it stick.

. . . and this one (I'm running out of time, so I can only copy them here without offering any personal reaction: SAD!!), from page 68 (remind me to react personally and with great outpourings of heart to these chosen ones at some point in the future):

     All this gets us Nowhere—which is a town like any other. The salesgirls of Nowhere are going home at the end of the day. I must assure myself of their reality by begging one for a dime. She obliges and even gives me a little peck on the forehead. I’m ready to throw aside my crutches and walk, but another wags her finger at me and tells me to behave myself.

I have a lot other excerpts to display, but, like I said, I am totally out of time, so I must stop here. But I will share another rap demo track in the postscript:

P.S.

Like I said, I will share one rap demo track in this postscript; I plan to keep uploading juvenile recordings to my Bandcamp page, since that network has not yet barred me from doing so. This most recent example is from a tape where my idea was simply to steal a four-bar loop from an ancient pop single and talk unfunnily about things that interest no one.