Borges

Someone flung a glass of wine in the face of a gentleman during a theological or literary debate. The victim did not show any emotion and said to the offender: "This, sir, is a digression: now, if you please, for the argument.

Miguel Servet's reply to the inquisitors who had condemned him to the stake: "I will burn, but this is a mere event. We shall continue our discussion in eternity."

I have already written more than one book in order to write, perhaps, one page. The page that justifies me, that summarizes my destiny, the one that perhaps only the attending angels will hear when judgment Day arrives.
Simply,: the page that, at dusk, upon the resolved truth of days' end, at sunset, with its dark and fresh breeze and girls glowing against the street, I would dare to read to a friend---Jorge Luis Borges1926.

http://youtu.be/zPgAjOLpm6s

Other yards

I've taken to wandering in the backyard as the farmer's of old, of The Mending Wall must have done. I step briefly into the alley behind our house, feigning an afternoons walk in the pleasant air, but what I'm really doing is looking at the fence line of my neighbors house, checking it for poison ivy or on the other side, for signs that we'll get a fuller commitment this year than the wild looking Tiger lilies that briefly dot their yard, appearing more as mirage of water in the desert than as actual ornaments.

Don't get confused, my yard is not pristine. It's currently growing seventeen types of weeds. We're running an experiment to see if grass can be entirely composed of things that are not grass while still carrying the moniker. But I care about my yard. I wish it well in the way that parents do children, or bankers investments. And I walk around in the alley checking to see if this is something that I share with my neighbors, a Thanksgiving of sorts, a shared love or at least interest in presenting a good face. And I must say that I am disappointed to find the poison ivy growing along the fence, worming it's way into their yards, and I don't know if I should warn them in a friendly conversation, or just surreptitiously spray the damn things into submission. If questioned, I can always tell them that all is well and that my wife works for the EPA. We'll leave groundwater quality to the next generation. My organic type idea is to plant honey suckle, a nasty and competitive invasive next to the poison ivy and let them battle it out, though I fear that I'd be the loser.

Content one afternoon I listen to my neighbor deliver a lecture to his sons as he mows the lawn and tries to tame the half-foot weeds that grow there. "You all want to have a cook out with all  your friends," he tells the silent and tall teenage boys. "But  you can't have a cook out with the yard looking this," he gestures expansively, though the point is partially lost now that he's mowed the majority of it. "And you expect me to do it. To mow the lawn for your cook outs." He walks away in disgust and the two boys awkwardly stand near the tool shed. I have things to aspire to.

Planting sun flowers in spring

In the back of the yard, well, more properly beyond the yard, though one would really need to set about drawing property lines, and I know that drawing property lines is no proper way to go about drawing in an audience, he attempted to plant sunflowers. Attempted may be a generous description of a process that involved scraping up bits of dirt and glass, old rocks and detritus from where they'd paved a year and a half ago and throwing it away. The dirt that is, bagging it up and attempting to lift it into the trash can, only to discover that dirt makes the bag too bottom heavy, and winding up standing in the alley, with a pile of dirt on his shoes and an empty trash bag.

Eventually, when the neighbors weren't looking, or maybe they were looking, but they could all go to hell for all he cared judging by the state of their yards, though the did care, he cared immensely, and would probably have pretended to be picking up the dirt and putting it in the trash by the handful if anyone was watching, he swept the dirt into the alleyway, which was comprised of dirt as it was, and probably none of his neighbors would have judged him for adding dirt to a dirt pile, but one can't always be sure. After this, taking a bag of sunflower seeds, reading about how far apart they're supposed to be spread, and beginning to drop them, slowly at first, as if they were grains of sand through an hour glass, and then speeding up as it occurred to him that it could take a while to spread them evenly over the space, and finally just kind of haphazardly throwing them together, putting three seeds right on top of one another and hoping that the right one comes out on top, because they are just sun flowers in a public alley after all.

He then swept the ally clean, removing all dirt and glass, blaming the glass on the garbage men who seemed rather careless if his ears were any judge, before attempting to cover the sunflower seeds with dirt, though some of it had been removed, and sort of half-assing the job, and leaving bits of the plants that he'd removed still rooted in clods of dirt so that they will no doubt immediately grab hold again and maybe choke out the weaker of the sunflowers, and what is that plant anyway? Finally, he added a layer of good solid top soil, or at the very least soil that had been left over from the prior spring's projects, which had turned out to be more ambitious in terms of imagination than in actual work. A trait he deemed forgivable in a writer but not a library worker.

He then went and got the hose and watered them, discovering that it was too short and turning it to jet, and sort of haphazardly kicking up bits of dirt and turning it to mud as he watered that new earth, waiting for something to grow.

 And today, the fruits of his labor began to pay off, two new shoots of oily leaves poking up through a fresh mound of dirt, half-obscured by the fence under which they are trying to grow. Two new poison ivy plants. It was work well done.

Dreams

Sometimes the bus comes right away, before you can even think about the myriad of things you have to do, it materializes as if it's very shape was given form by your need. Other days you stand in the rain without an umbrella waiting for a bus that no longer exists, that perhaps, now that you think of it, never existed. But it's hard to focus because your shoes are suede, and it's now very wet. On this parable or story hangs some of the law and the majority of the prophets.


He dreamed, as all dreamers do, that he was made up of bits and pieces of himself, as if his memory, which was sort of true, had been raided by a crow, looking for shiny things, gum wrappers, aluminum foil, to construct a nest. It was these disparate things, an old grey day at the beach, a woman he's seen in passing on the train, a memory of his grandmother's pearl brooch, through which his reality, like some fun house mirror was made. The reality of the dream that is. True reality, of the sort that you and I inhabit tends to be far less interesting and more bound by temporal and substantial things like alarm clocks and brown chaise lounge chairs pushed up against the wall to block wall sockets from curious toddlers. That is not the type of reality that we need though.

He walked through the dream land as a traveler passing through veils of silk on his way to sleep with a beautiful brown skinned woman who reminds him of his mother and his wife, and of all the unsent e-mails, botched cover letters, and scarred furniture of his youth. She had a mole on her right thigh in the shape of the Milky Way, or maybe it was a trash bag that he'd seen blowing across the street while waiting for the cross town bus. Reality is a bit-h who always has nicer shoes than you.

He slipped underneath the layers of the dream, which were shaped like waves, and his mind was the prow of some unmanned ship wandering the seas, main mast whipped by winds and ragged white sails hung loose like the flesh on all the dead sailor's bones. And then he was awake. He had forgotten that today was Tuesday. Tuesday. Tuesday. He was supposed to do something on Tuesday. Oh yes, he lay his head down quietly on a very rigid pillow. He had promised that he would go grocery shopping and buy bananas. It was okay now to sleep.

An Easter Tradtion

– From E.B. White’s introduction of his late wife’s essays entitled
Onward and Upward in the Garden.

The only moment in the year when she actually got herself up for gardening was on the day in fall that she had selected, in advance, for the laying out of the spring bulb garden. The morning often turned out to be raw and overcast, with a searching wind off the water — an easterly that finds its way quickly to your bones.

Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katharine would get into a shabby old Brooks raincoat much too long for her, put on a little round wool hat, pull on a pair of overshoes, and proceed to the director’s chair — a folding canvas thing — that had been placed for her at the edge of the plot. There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while Henry Allen produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for the intricate interment. As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion — the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.

http://youtu.be/pgVL-rBq9Fw



Let's talk about the key points in that old blight on the intellectual world, Christianity:



And one of them, a doctor of the Law, putting him to the test, asked him, "Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?"

Jesus said to him, "'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.'

This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it,

'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22:35-40) Let us remember the second great commandment that arises from the first. I do not think it was intended to be taken as lightly as we have taken it.

Let's also be reminded that the celebration of the Resurrection is a celebration of the wedding between the divine and the human. That, if the scriptures are to be believed, the Lord saw each and every human being as worth saving, as special, as exceptional, as we'd all like to see ourselves in our heart of hearts. It's a good day for reflecting on the mystery and the wonder of divinity and humanity.

By Night In Chile/Six Memos for the Next Millenium

Roberto Bolano "By Night in Chile"

"I modestly lowered my eyes, like a wounded fledgeling, and imagined that estate where the critic's path was indeed strewn with roses, where knowing how to read was valued, and where taste was more important than practical necessities and obligations.."

"and in its own way the painting was an altar for human sacrifice, and in its own way the painting was an expression of supreme boredom, and in its own way the painting was an acknowledgement of defeat, not the defeat of Paris or the defeat of European culture bravely determined to burn itself down, not the political defeat of certain ideals the painter tepidly espoused, but his personal defeat, the defeat of an obscure, poor Guatemalan, who had come to the City of Light determined to make his name in its artistic circles, and the way in which the Guatemalan accepted his defeat, with a clear-sightedness reaching far beyond the particular and anecdotal..."

Six Memos for the Next Millenium by Italo Calvino

"This is what Kundera has done with great clarity and immediacy. For Kundera the weight of living consists chiefly in constriction, in the dense net of public and private constrictions that enfolds us more and more closely. His novel shows us how everything we choose and value in life for its lightness soon reveals its true, unbearable weight."

One sentence stories

"When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there."

"For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive thatn what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrow of experience."

"I have come to the end of this apologia for the novel as a vast net. Someone might object that the more work tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from what the unicum which is the self of the writer, his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable."