Without Lifting A Finger

Another Lap

Charlie's a Boston. He acts tough but is all bark and no bite (he's afraid of the neighbor's cat). The squirrel is one and many. All over the place. This morning he greeted me and put on quite a show. I lucked out and got a little rain in CA while walking along Marine Stadium (rowing center side). Pascal told me to be content (happy) in my own room, so I'll hang out inside for the remainder of the day.

We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes—or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers. One need never have left this little town to have Hitler's voice still ringing in one's ears, to have seen the Shah of Persia from a distance of three yards, and to know how the monsoon howls over the Himalayas or what it looks like six hundred fathoms beneath the sea. Anyone can know these things nowadays. Does it mean I have ever been to the bottom of the sea? Or even (like the Swiss) almost up Mount Everest? And it's just the same with the inner life of man. Anyone can know about it nowadays. How the devil am I to prove to my counsel that I don't know my murderous impulses through C. G. Jung, jealousy through Marcel Proust, Spain through Hemingway, Paris through Ernst Jiinger, Switzerla...

Here we must go back a little. Stiller, as we know, took part in the Spanish Civil War, while still a very young man, as a volunteer in the International Brigade. It is not clear what impelled him to this militant gesture. Probably many factors were combined—a rather romantic Communism, such as was common among bourgeois intellectuals at that time, also an understandable desire to see the world, a desire to subordinate his personal interests to some higher historical force, a desire for action; perhaps too, at least in part, it was flight from himself.

'The village was called Paricutin. Now that is the name of the new volcano,' I finished my story, 'and if you ever go to Mexico, my dear Doktor, drive out to this Paricutin. The roads are terrible, but it's worth while, especially at night; glowing stones fly fifteen hundred feet into the air, and there is a rumbling like the rumbling of an avalanche, and just before it begins smoke always billows up from the crater like a giant cauliflower, but black and red, red underneath where it catches the light from the flames below. Not so long ago the eruptions succeeded one another at pretty short intervals—six minutes, ten minutes, three minutes, each eruption throwing up a cascade of glowing stones, most of which were extinguished before they struck the ground. It's a first-class firework, believe me. Especially the lava. From the middle of a dark heap of dead slag, on which the moon shines without detracting from its blackness, the lava shoots out bright crimson, in spu...

My short Alchemy Series (5 poems inspired by a recent rereading of Strindberg's Inferno ) is up at Offcourse #81: Alchemy Series by R L Swihart .

Read the first in the trilogy some years ago. Then, seeing it was coming out in May, I next read  The Death of Jesus. Lastly, I read the middle text: The Schooldays of Jesus . Have been lazy about posting reading "clips" (busy with the end of school, the end of a career), but this one was pretty good so I had to post it. * He drops in on a class in astrology. Discussion turns to the Spheres: whether the stars belong to the Spheres or on the contrary follow trajectories of their own; whether the Spheres are finite or infinite in number. The lecturer believes the number of Spheres is finite – finite but unknown and unknowable, as she puts it. ‘If the number of Spheres is finite, then what lies beyond them?’ asks a student. ‘There is no beyond,’ replies the lecturer. The student looks nonplussed. ‘There is no beyond,’ she repeats. He is not interested in the Spheres, or even in the stars, which as far as he is concerned are lumps of insensate matter moving through empty...

Without Lifting A Finger: W. H. Auden's "Funeral Blues" : Just finished rewatching Four Weddings and a Funeral (with hair-flipping Hugh). I think the poem was perhaps the highlight of the film (I h...