A. As promised, Bricolage, with citations left out as a sort of ode to Following The Yellow Brick Road (although by definition this really is no bricolage, even if i give no indication who said waht) - I have a lot of time on my hands and a fairly laissez faire approach to how it should be spent, is the thing:1. Instead of coming to have a concept of something because we have noticed that sort of thing, to have the ability to notice requires already having the concept, and cannot account for it.
2. The more diverse and individualistic a culture is, the more permeable it is to outside influences; and the freer and more mobile the population, the fewer are the certitudes. In America people are constantly rubbing shoulders, figuratively speaking, with fellow Americans known to have emphatically different views on the big issues, such as evolution, sexual morality, the nature of God, the importance of money, the value of fetal life, the morality of euthanasia, the rights of animals, the scope of equality, the proper aims and methods of international relations, the structure of the family, and the significance of race.
3. Perhaps for this very reason – the anxiety that rights were products of government rather than of nature – the age of the written constitution and the printed enumeration of rights was also an age deeply divided about textualizing rights.
4. So the time of the successful farming family is passing, and those who were settled in that way of life are as sad to see it go as American family farmers are whose lands are accumulated by giant agribusinesses. We can sympathize with them. But we cannot force their children to stay in the name of protecting their authentic culture, and we cannot afford to subsidize indefinitely thousands of distinct islands of homogeneity that no longer make economic sense. Nor should we. Human variety matters, cosmopolitans think, because people are entitled to options. What John Stuart Mill said more than century ago in “On Liberty” about diversity within a society serves just as well as an argument for variety across the globe: “If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can exist in the same physical, atmosphere and climate. The same things which are helps to one person towards the cultivation of his higher nature, are hindrances to another . . . Unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable.” If we want to preserve a wide range of human conditions because it allows free people the best chance to make their own lives, we can’t enforce diversity by trapping people within differences they long to escape. (BOO-yah.)
5. It wasn’t quite a choice – it was a realization. I was twenty-eight and I had a job as a market researcher. One day I told my psychiatrist that what I really wanted was to quit my job and write poetry. And the psychiatrist said, “why not?” And I said, “What would the American Psychoanalytical Association say?” And he said, “There’s no party line.” So I did.
B. Most draft analysts agree that a prospective game of Terrorism v. America has a significant amount of Upside, but few agree on how much influence that will have on GMs who are twice bitten once shy with regards to purported Upside.
Looking forward to the State of the Union? Two years ago (or was it three?), when I had a job that was affiliated with politics in kind of isolated but austere watchdog way, my co-workers and I watched the SotU without succumbing to the passive spectation of those in the know. I don’t remember much of the context out of which Terrorism v. America was borne. (This was a period during which I earned a reputation of being a bit of a beer mooch – “Bring six, drink nine” was an oft-applied sobriquet amongst the tenants of the house at which I obtained my televisual fix, being too cheap to purchase an idiot box and the requisite DirecTV package.) I do, however, remember the game’s basic premise. Terrorism v. America is modeled on old “Roxanne/Red Light” drinking game of the Olde College Years. In “Roxanne/Red Light,” you listen to the Sting song after dividing up into two groups, one of which consumes a swallow of beer after the word “Roxanne” is sung, the other of which does same after “Red light” is sung. While watching the speech, no reaction need be made when the President squints his squint, or shifts his weight back to his heels and then leans up against the podium for emphasis; attempts to mimic the clipped Texas drawl of the President, by which “terror” becomes “terra” and “America” becomes “mer-ka,” are encouraged but not necessary. The only thing you need to do is drink when the President says “America” or “terrorism,” depending on which team you’re on. In our circle, “terror,” “terrorism,” and “terrorists” were all functionally the same. Likewise with “America” and “American,” but for some reason “the United States” was not included as a drink prompt. Given the correct demographics, serious sober contemplation of the SotU is to the onset of crippling cynicism as Terrorism v. America is to the onset of flagrantly enjoyable idiocy, of which idiocy all of us need a periodic dose. Projecting my shit onto you is not my bag, however, so feel free to watch another rerun of Seinfeld if your druthers lead you down that path.
C. By (implied) request, with apologies beforehand if this gives offense to your sense of decorum’s steadfast disavowal of ababcdcd. . . rhyme schemes.Sacred Heart
For one who watches with too little rest
A body rousing fitfully to its pain
- The nerves like dull burns where the sheet has pressed -
Subsiding to dementia yet again;
For one who snatches what repose he can,
Exhausted by the fretful reflexes
Jerked from the torpor of a dying man,
Sleep is fear, invaded as it is
By coil on coil of ominous narrative
In which specific isolated streaks,
Bright as tattoos, of inks that seem to live,
Shift through elusive patterns. Once in those weeks
You dreamt your dying friend hung crucified
In his front room, against the mantelpiece;
Yet it was Christmas, when you went outside
The shoppers bustled, bells rang without cease,
You smelt a sharp excitement on the air,
Crude itch of evergreen. But you returned
To find him still nailed up, mute sufferer
Lost in a trance of pain, toward whom you yearned.
When you woke up, you could not reconcile
The two conflicting scenes, indoors and out.
But it was Christmas. And parochial school
Accounted for the Dying God no doubt.
Now since his death you’ve lost the wish for sleep,
In which you might mislay the wound of feeling;
Drugged you drag grief from room to room and weep,
Preserving it from closure, from a healing
Into the novelty of glazed pink flesh.
We hear you stumble vision-ward above,
Keeping the edges open, bloody, fresh
Wound, no – the heart, His Heart, broken with love.
An unfamiliar ticking makes you look
Down your left side where, suddenly apparent
Like a bright plate from an anatomy book
- In its snug housing, under the transparent
Planes of swept muscle and the barreled bone –
The heart glows, and you feel the holy heat:
The heart of hearts transplanted to your own
Losing rich purple drops with every beat.
Yet even as it does your vision alters,
The hallucination lighted through the skin
Begins to deaden (though still bleeding), falters,
And hardens to its evident origin
- A red heart from a cheap religious card,
Too smooth, too glossy, too securely cased!
Stopped in a crouch, you wearily regard
Each drop dilute into the waiting waste.
