Morning thots (tamed)

Dear diary,

What do we want from our friends? Are our friends satisfactory or lacking? How many friends should a person have?

How cold should we make winter? Which is to say: If we find that we, the gods, are tasked with making a new planet for people to live on, how threatening should we allow our winter to be? Should we allow it to freeze people to death? Or should we just make it mildly cool, like a room where you hold corporate meetings?

If you died while raking leaves in your backyard, your body would be preserved. It would not decay. It would be like the body of a rodent stored in a freezer. You then could be thawed out and fed to a snake.

How many parades should one march in, in one’s lifetime? Is there a requisite amount? And should the parades have a theme? Should they “stand for” something, or is it OK if they are just fun? I like parades because they show off the outfits of their marchers. Sometimes the marchers are military officers, so their outfits are stiff and soberly hued, and they have medallions and other impressive accessories affixed to them: these symbols of merit strike fear in the heart of the beholder. Other times the marchers are clad in businesswear. Some people sport crisp, clean, button-up shirts with pressed collars. Some people wear hats.

Underneath the clothes you find the skin. And skin comes in different colors. Skin often holds blood. Blood can be painted as red or blue. Are bones not white? And I’ve never found a tongue inside a skeleton. Probably the specimens that I’m stumbling upon aren’t fresh enough.

Why is it so hard to remember the parts of an atom? You could research the topic, by turning on your computer, but that would be cheating. So let’s try to remember what the Lord bade us disseminate universally. All atoms are the size of billiard balls. Every atom is composed of a nucleus, festooned to which is at least one electron. The nucleus is made of a proton or more, and, typically, as well, a similar number of neutrons. The protons have a positive electric charge, the electrons are negative, and the neutrons are chargeless: they have no electric charge whatsoever.

Here’s the juicy part: The electrons of an atom are attracted to the protons in an atomic nucleus by dictate of the electromagnetic force, also known as ‘true love’, ‘mad love’, & ‘forbidden love’. This is allied to the notion of forgiveness.

Here’s the nasty part: The protons and neutrons in the nucleus are drawn to each other by a different force—the nuclear force—which is stronger than the abovementioned force: while electromagnetism tries to persuade all particles to forgive one other, this force of the nuclear family keeps coaxing its positively charged protons to forsake their brethren’s onward-outward attraction. Thus it is known (ironically) as ‘divine love’; or just plain ‘hate’. It’s actually not stronger than the other force—I just said that it was stronger to get your attention.

II

How often have you dreamt of copper atoms? What if, after you die, Mussolini greets your ghost by shouting: “You didn’t dream of copper atoms enough!” And what if he continues his rant, saying: “You should dream of copper atoms 29 times, between the ages of…”

I don’t want to let the afterlife’s ambassador set the proper age for dreaming. You’re never too old to dream about the properties of copper. The important thing is that you TRY. Here, I’ll offer a few suggestions:

• You could dream of copper pipes, which carry semifluid material below the earth’s crust, like veins in a godhead.
• You could dream of copper pennies, which are almost worth something in heaven’s marketplace, because they place them on the eyelids of dead dreamers, to help reach their quota; and they also toss them in heaven’s wishing-well, which (you guessed right) leads to hell.

Also the Statue of Liberty, the New Colossus, Mother of Exiles (“Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...”) is made of copper: so you could dream of her. She has green skin, smooth to the touch. The magnetic properties of her atoms are influenced by the number of their respective electrons. One leg at a time, she pulls her dress back on, like any harlot. (Sorry I said this—I’m somewhat attracted to the notion of freedom.)

III

If you could suck all the future out of a box, and sell the box to an amazonian warrior, and then infest the soul of your own customer, I wonder what it would feel like to step from the jungle of spacetime into your valise-sans-futurity and then back out again. This succession of moments, represented by three oblong panels, if you were to depict it as a comic in the Sunday newspaper, on the so-called “funnies” page, would have to start with the descent of the nude, continue with the entry of the nude, and end with the noxbon (abandonment of the boîte), which latter panel would be one with the continued box·u·pation (occupation of the valise); so you’d have to print the thing as a fold-out, like an accordion.

IV

And when you’re at a dinner party, sipping your non-alcoholic beverage, and a duo dressed as Batwoman & Supergirl approaches and demands to know your discipline, and you answer either “My discipline is chemistry,” or “My discipline is anthropology,” what exactly do you mean? For that word discipline is generally defined as

the practice of training people to obey a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience.

So, what if you are on the opposite side of punishment and rules? Antinomian = anti (against) + nomos (law). In other words: How can poetry, which is essentially un-disciplined, be a discipline? Maybe cuz it’s studied imaginativeness. Which makes me wonder: Can there be fake truth or true faith: artificial artifice? Is that what they mean by “art for art’s sake”? I don’t think so. Calculated miscalculation is like a computer trying to behave in a random style. You can’t program sin: it just has to happen: you plant two trees and make two folks, and tell the folks “bite this tree not that tree” and they bite the wrong tree: now that’s correct error. Then you can punt them out of your boardroom: Adam and Eve.

Now from the quality of curvaceousness, which the LORD God had subtracted from the essence of the male, he invented a female, and brought her unto the first created garden-bot; whereon Adam exclaimed, “This is now proton of my protons, and neutron of my neutrons (bone, flesh, & hugs): she shall be called Woman, because she is basically Man sublimated!”

Thus, in a studied repetition of this amendment, every subsequent soul shall run away from its parents, and shall cleave unto its sweetheart: and they shall have their electrons.

And they were freethinkers, the spouse and her spouse, and were proud to be so. (Genesis 2:22-25)

Thus, Adam becomes a single bloodline with Eve. For the blood is the life. (Think of poor Dracula.) But Eve can attach to one or more other Adams by chemical bonds to form compounds such as Molecules, which contain whole hoards of electrons (like thots, they come and go, we know not how). The ability of each Eve to associate and dissociate with “the it” — that is: all non-self, which floods self’s expanses outward and inward (for the self is a boundary; like a house in the desert, within which is wilderness) — is responsible for most of the laughable aspects of life (known aliases: Mother Nature; Father Time), and this flux — which is Mind, yet which contains Mind and which is contained by Mind — is both fuel and engine of the undisciplined Imagination.