Without Lifting A Finger

Hanna utters no reproaches, Hanna doesn’t find the way I behaved toward Sabeth incomprehensible; in Hanna’s opinion I experienced a kind of relationship I was unfamiliar with and therefore misinterpreted, persuading myself I was in love. It was no chance mistake, but a mistake that is part of me(?), like my profession, like the rest of my life. My mistake lay in the fact that we technologists try to live without death. Her own words: “You don’t treat life as form, but as a mere sum arrived at by addition, hence you have no relationship to time, because you have no relationship to death.” Life is form in time. Hanna admits that she can’t explain what she means. Life is not matter and cannot be mastered by technology. My mistake with Sabeth lay in repetition. I behaved as though age did not exist, and hence contrary to nature. We cannot do away with age by continuing to add up, by marrying our children.

Twenty-four hours ago (it seemed to me like a memory from my youth!) Sabeth and I were still sitting at Acrocorinthus waiting for the sunrise. I shall never forget it. We had come from Patras and got out at Corinth to see the seven pillars of a temple, then we had supper at a nearby guesthouse. Apart from this, Corinth is little more than a hamlet. By the time we discovered there were no rooms free it was already getting dark; Sabeth thought it a wonderful idea of mine just to wander on into the night and sleep under a fig tree. Actually I had only meant it as a joke, but since Sabeth thought it a wonderful idea we really set off across country in search of a fig tree. Then we heard the barking of sheep dogs, uproar all around us, the flocks in the night; there must have been quite a number of the beasts, to judge by their yapping, and in the heights to which they drove us there were no fig trees, but only thistles and wind. Sleep was out of the question. I never thought night in Greec...

Hump Day with the Rock Wren Family @ Ocean Trails Reserve in Palos Verdes CA. Terrible lighting (June Gloom is with us still) but I'll return on a sunnier day.🤞🎈 #rlswihart #humpday #oceantrailsreserve #palosverdes #rockwren #wrensofinstagram #junegloom #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2023 #ukraine🇺🇦🎈

Perhaps Hanna expected too much, where men were concerned, though I think she loved men. If there were any reproaches, they were self-reproaches; if Hanna could or had to live again, she would love men quite differently. She found it natural that men (she said) were mentally restricted, and only regretted her own stupidity in thinking each of them (I don’t know how many there had been) an exception. Yet Hanna, to my mind, is anything but stupid. But she thought herself so. She thought it stupid of a woman to want to be understood by a man; the man (said Hanna) wants the woman to be a mystery, so that he can be inspired and excited by his own incomprehension. The man hears only himself, according to Hanna, therefore the life of a woman who wants to be understood by a man must inevitably be ruined. According to Hanna. The man sees himself as master of the world and the woman only as his mirror. The master is not compelled to learn the language of the oppressed; the woman is compelled, th...

 Sabeth listened when I told her about my experiences, but as one listens to an old man; without interrupting, politely, without believing, without getting excited.

I took the standpoint that the profession of technologist, a man who masters matter, is a masculine profession, if not the only masculine profession there is. I told them we were on a ship, that is to say a product of technology . . . “True,” he said, “very true.” And all the time he held her arm, pretending to be interested and attentive merely so as not to have to let go of the girl’s arm. “Go on,” he said, “go on.” The girl came to my aid. As I hadn’t seen the sculptures in the Louvre she brought the conversation around to my robots; but I didn’t feel like talking about them and merely said that sculptures and things like that are nothing more (to my way of thinking) than forebears of the robot. Primitive peoples tried to annul death by portraying the human body—we do it by finding substitutes for the human body. Technology instead of mysticism!

I only lost my temper when Marcel started to talk about my work, that is to say about UNESCO, saying the technologist was the final guise of the white missionary, industrialization the last gospel of a dying race and living standards a substitute for a purpose in living ... I asked him if he was a Communist. Marcel denied it.

Lone Mitred Parakeet @ LBCU (near Wilson HS), trying to take a short nap (see #4). Long Beach CA. They're more likely to be seen in small groups (a dozen or so), flying high above the treeline or in the trees (palm, magnolia, other), but you can occasionally catch them alone. #rlswihart #longbeachca #wilsonhs #lbcu #parakeetsofinstagram #mitredparakeet #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2023 #meniscuspoetry #donners #ukraine 🇺🇦🎈🦜

My new poem "Donners" is up Down Under @ Meniscus (Volume 11, Issue 1, p. 168). My thanks to the magazine and especially the editor, Jen Webb. You can download the whole issue at the link below, then navigate to p. 168. Lots of good poetry, so read it all.:) https://meniscus.org.au/current-issue

  In the woods, who knows where, Stands a green fir-tree;  A rosebush, who can tell, Blooms in what garden?  Already they have been chosen – Oh soul, remember! –  To take root on your grave, For they must grow there.  Out on the meadow two Black steeds are grazing,  And homewards to the town They trot so sprightly.  They will be walking when They draw your coffin;  Who knows but that may be Even before they shed  That iron on their hooves That glints so brightly.

“What will happen now?” Barlach whispered. “Nothing will happen,” replied the Jew, grabbing the old man by the shoulders and pulling him up so that their faces were close together, eye to eye. “Nothing, nothing at all,” the giant whispered again. “No one knows, except for you and Hungertobel, that I was here; inaudibly, I glided, a shadow, through the corridors, to Emmenberger, to you, no one knows that I exist, only the poor devils I have saved, a handful of Jews, a handful of Christians. Let the world bury Emmenberger and let the newspapers publish their eulogies and memorials for this dead man. The Nazis wanted Stutthof; the millionaires, this hospital; others will want other things. We can’t save the world as individuals, that would be a task as hopeless as that of poor Sysyphus; it is not up to us, nor is it up to any man of power, or any nation, or the devil himself, who is surely more powerful than anyone; it is in the hand of God, who makes his decisions alone. We can only help...

“I think you’re used to that,” the old man retorted. Emmenberger was taken aback for a moment. “I’m pleased,” he finally said, shaking his head, “that you haven’t lost your sense of humor. Let’s start with Fortschig. He was sentenced to death and executed. My dwarf did a good job. Climbing down the light shaft of the house in the Kesslergasse, after a strenuous promenade across wet roof tiles, cats purring all around him, then squeezing through that little window and landing a truly powerful and deadly blow with my car key against the skull of our poetaster on his throne—this was not easy for my little Tom Thumb.

 

Thus I, Edith Marlok, a thirty-four-year-old woman, commit the crimes that are demanded of me in exchange for a colorless liquid which, injected beneath my skin, gives me the courage of contempt during the day and the beauty of dreams at night, a fleeting illusion of being in possession of what no longer exists: this world as God created it. C’est ça.

 

“All it takes to hear this story is a little nerve; less nerve than it did to live through it,” continued the Jew in his old musty caftan in a singing tone. “It’s time to forget all these things, they say, and not just in Germany; there’s cruelty in Russia too, and there are sadists everywhere; but I don’t want to forget anything, and not just because I am a Jew—six million of my people the Germans killed, six million!—; no, it’s because I am still a human being, even though I live in basements and cellars with the rats! I refuse to make a distinction between peoples, I refuse to speak of good and bad nations; but I do have to make one distinction between human beings, this was beaten into me, and from the first blow that cut into my flesh I distinguished between the torturers and the tortured.

The city lay there, a white shell, sucking up the light, swallowing it into her narrow streets in order to spew it out after nightfall as thousands of lights, a monster perpetually busy with spawning and poisoning and burying an ever-growing quantity of new human beings.

The Kids are on the Cliffs in San Pedro, but not for long. Loving it.♥️ #rlswihart #sanpedro #pointfermin #falconsofinstagram #peregrinefalcon #kids #immature #theygrowupsofast #naturepics #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2023 #ukraine🇺🇦🎈