I was feeling lusterless and uninspired, so I snipped out of the newspaper a nondescript photo, flipped it head over heels, and randomly taped to it a couple pics of staring faces in a crowd. The image file is named "folks lookin and stuff is upside-down". It is worth 20 dollars.
. . . And here's a bonus pic in case you find the first one boring (two bores make a fun?) — it is the would-be top half of the image that accompanies "His sun has orbited us long enough" which, being a reasonable person, I deleted:
Gentle reader,
You’ve heard the adage that is boomed by every Gandhi-bomb that drops:
Be the change that you wish to see in the world.
Well, now let’s say that I find that I’ve been kidnapped by mercenaries, and they haul me before a secret intelligence agent who holds a gun to my head and demands that I compose and post, on the social network of my choice, my own all-caps variation on the above. In this case, I’d say:
CORNUCOPIATE THE IMAGINATION YOU ALREADY ARE.
And that first word is not a typo: I simply coined it (I hold three patents on it and the copyright: you cannot use my new word in a sentence) — it’s the firstborn beast of “cornucopia” and “radiate”.
*
Do people ever teach you things, and then you find out later that what they taught you was bogus? That happens to me all the time. So I’m worried that if I comment on the things that I hear, say, on an average businessday — things that are told to me by my co-workers whose credibility is questionable (to say the least) — then, by the act of mentioning these overheard remarks, even if my purpose is to debunk them, I’ll become an accomplice of the crime of spreading disinformation. I therefore want to stress that I understand how irresponsible it is for me to relay anything spoken by Mr. Rot, who happens to work in the cubicle next to me. Coincidentally he was also my grade-school history teacher.
Yesterday Mr. Rot told me that, unlike these modern times in North America, where the custom is for people to shower thrice daily, back in Shakespeare’s day, because of the shortage of soapy water, plus the detrimental effect of perpetual winter, people could only bathe one time per year.
Now, as soon as I heard this fact, I was transfixed. I vowed to never bathe again in my life. And when I get an idea into my head, I’m as stubborn as a mule about it: I’ll never let it go. So I just wanna warn you, for the next time you see me: I’m not gonna bathe anymore.
I also care very much about mental hygiene. I want my mind to work well, to be well trimmed of all hair; I don’t want my mind to come clean. I like its aroma.
And I’m concerned, as always, about the quality of my writing. I find that I’m always drifting towards the dangerous unhealthy realms of abstraction and complexity. That’s not the righteous path. I want to be more SIMPLE in these pages. (Yes, I keep returning to this idea; I now recall mentioning it before.) Note to self: Just state your honest thots. You know you are stupid, there’s no changing that: let it all hang out. Your example will either inspire others to come out of the closet and admit that, all along, they too have been faking superior intellect; OR you will prove an amusing plaything for the smart.
So, as a stupid person, I look at my country’s situation: the wars and the…
What should I add, to finish the sentence above about our country’s situation. We have wars, and we have question-mark. I can’t think of anything. Malls, maybe? But malls are the direct offshoot of foreign wars (the latter brings about the former: you invade a country that is rich in resources, you steal those resources and ship them back to the homeland, and you convert a portion of the resources into building material, which eventually becomes the brick-and-mortar mall, and the remainder of the resources get converted into vendable merchandise, which is sold at the mall); indeed, these two ideas — wars and malls — are so closely related that if I employ them as independent examples, people will smell the fishiness of my argument and rise from their pews and leave my church, right in the middle of my sermon, without contributing to the treasury.
So I talked about Syria before, and my stance was basically: I know very little, perhaps nothing; but I still wish the conflict would relax. And I hear arguments from one side and the other: one side says that if we (the United States) remain in Syria, it’ll be bad for the civilians there, because obviously it’s bad to have foreign soldiers lurking around every coffee shop. Yet the other side says that if we ABANDON Syria, it’ll be even WORSE for these citizens, for there are aggressors who live nearby, who leave the citizens unmolested only so long as the realm is haunted by a U.S. presence.
I don’t entirely grasp this side of the argument: this is where things get too involved for me to (convincingly) continue to lie my way thru this interview.
For I believe I am being interviewed for the position of either Madman Commander Bryan or Foreign Correspondent Bryan. I’m thinking it would either be good for me to report on the casualties in battle (to say, “I’m Bryan Ray reporting live from the Hyperborean Doom Funnel. The reason this teardrop is streaking down my face is that a couple more people got sucked up and away from their life of contemplation this morning of January 7”) or it would be good for me to call the shots in war (to say “Shoot here!” or “Shoot there!” or “Tell the troops to march North-north-west until they reach the Swamp of Miss Ophelia!” or “Fire the officer who is my second-in-command, for he discharged a whole bunch of nuclear explosives at the preschool and at the local hospital yestereven, yet none of the arsenal exploded, as he neglected to light their fuses or pull their detonation keys or even so much as kiss them prior to launch. This is unforgivable behavior in a warrior; Mr. Rot should stick to playing first-person shooter games in the cubicle next to Dorko, back home in Minnesota. Leave the actual warfare to us professionals: the true soldiers of fortune. For the private sector can do all things more efficiently except blog about looking fashionable online. And when our firms go bust, we sometimes need the public to bail us out. But we’re still the better option, compared to democracy; and the proof of this is that we nip democracy in the bud: we do not allow it to exist. Now if democracy were such a good idea, then why does it let itself get aborted by us corporate mercenaries? People-centered systems are therefore a crock.”)
All I’m trying to say, plainly and simply, is that I don’t know what is going on in Syria. But I doubt that righteous decision-making landed us in this position. And, as I keep repeating, we eventually will have to come to terms with the fact that private, secretive government agencies are antithetical to a democratic society.
P.S.
In yesterday’s entry, I alluded to a late-12th-century personage in the parable I was telling:
Satan is a prosecuting attorney named Mr. Chretien, as in “good christian neighbor from Troyes.”
Now my sweetheart was reading over the entry, and when she got to this part, she shouted at the top of her lungs: “Who is this Monsieur Chrétien that you mention? — do you mean our neighbor Jean, the former Prime Minister of Canada?”
And I answered, “No, no, no, no, NO!! Didn’t you catch the reference to TROYES!?!?!?”
And she admitted, “I never read your words very carefully.”
So, to clear up this matter, I shall copy another quotation from David Graeber’s Debt, which is one of the most enthralling books I have ever encountered. The following passage is from Chapter Ten.
It would be instructive to pause a moment to think about this term, “merchant adventurer.” Originally it just meant a merchant who operated outside his own country. It was around this same time, however, at the height of the fairs of Champagne and the Italian merchant empires, between 1160 and 1172, that the term “adventure” began to take on its contemporary meaning. The man most responsible for it was the French poet Chretien de Troyes, author of the famous Arthurian romances — most famous, perhaps, for being the first to tell the story of Sir Percival and the Holy Grail. The romances were a new sort of literature featuring a new sort of hero, the “knight-errant,” a warrior who roamed the world in search of, precisely, “adventure” — in the contemporary sense of the word: perilous challenges, love, treasure, and renown. Stories of knightly adventure quickly became enormously popular, Chretien was followed by innumerable imitators, and the central characters in the stories — Arthur & Guinevere, Lancelot, Gawain, Percival, & the rest — became known to everyone, as they are still. This courtly ideal of the gallant knight, the quest, the joust, romance and adventure, remains central to our image of the Middle Ages.
I also love that this brings to mind Don Quixote. – Now here I’ll skip ahead in the text and give one last excerpt:
And what of the Grail, that mysterious object that all the knights-errant were ultimately seeking? Oddly enough, Richard Wagner, composer of the opera Parzifal, first suggested that the Grail was a symbol inspired by the new forms of finance. Where earlier epic heroes sought after, and fought over, piles of real, concrete gold and silver—the Nibelung’s hoard—these new ones, born of the new commercial economy, pursued purely abstract forms of value. No one, after all, knew precisely what the Grail was. Even the epics disagree: sometimes it’s a plate, sometimes a cup, sometimes a stone. (Wolfram von Eschenbach imagined it to be a jewel knocked from Lucifer’s helmet in a battle at the dawn of time.) In a way it doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s invisible, intangible, but at the same time of infinite, inexhaustible value, containing everything, capable of making the wasteland flower, feeding the world, providing spiritual sustenance, and healing wounded bodies. Marc Shell even suggested that it would best be conceived as a blank check, the ultimate financial abstraction.
Holy Grail as blank check. Can you beat that? — But to return to the whole main reason I decided to quote all this, I should add that after that last word above is the following footnote:
Shell sees the Grail as a transformation of the older notion of the cornucopia or inexhaustible purse in an age “just beginning to be acquainted with checks and credit” — noting the connection of the legend with the Templars, and fact that Chretien — whose name means “Christian” — was likely, for that reason, to have been a converted Jew...
So that explains why, at the aforesaid point in my previous entry, I used the name Chretien and connected it with the religious designation. But I didn’t want to quote this whole long passage and end-note in the original, because it would’ve broken up the smooth flow of its text; which, if you go read it over again, you’ll notice is glistening and beautiful, just like a river. Plus I only wanted to make fun of Christians, because I was raised in that cult, and I believe it’s only right to make fun of one’s own culture, never the culture of your brother, unless you feel like doing something weak vulgar and low, and I just didn’t feel like doing anything weak vulgar or low at that split second. Maybe later, stay tuned.
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