Nicole

I’ve never really been a big podcast listener, or a listener of WNYC’s Radio Lab, but a friend passed this along and I thought it was fantastic.

OOPS.

Hold on til the very end. It’s worth it.

Tags: accidents, environment, geese

(wrenched from a geocities site in the depths of the Wayback Machine)

I N T R O D U C T I O N

The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople– it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs. Take the matter of being born. What does being born mean to mostpeople? Catastrophe unmitigated. Socialrevolution. The cultured aristocrat yanked out of his hyperexclusively ultravoluptuous superpalazzo,and dumped into an incredibly vulgar detentioncamp swarming with every conceivable species of undesirable organism. Mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness. If mostpeople were to be born twice they’d improbably call it dying–

you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now’and now is much to busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.

Life,for mostpeople,simply isn’t. Take the socalled standardofliving. What do mostpeople mean by “living”? They don’t mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science,in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail,a mountain’s a mammal. Mostpeople’s wives could spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence immediately and will accept no substitutes.

-luckily for us,a mountain is a mammal. The plusorminus movie to end moving,the strictly scientific parlourgame of real unreality,the tyranny conceived in misconception and dedicated to the proposition that every man is a woman and any woman is a king,hasn’t a wheel to stand on. What their synthetic not to mention transparent majesty, mrsandmr collective foetus,would improbably call a ghost is walking. He isn’t a undream of anaesthetized impersons, or a cosmic comfortstation,or a transcedentally sterilized lookiesoundiefeelietastiesmellie. He is a healthily complex,a naturally homogenous,citizen of immorality. The now of his each pitying free imperfect gesture,his any birth of breathing,insults perfected inframortally milleniums of slavishness. He is a little more than everything,he is democracy;he is alive:he is ourselves.

Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn,a human being;somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush “tie it to my hand”–

nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled,real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening,innocent spontaneaous,true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden,but actually flowers which breasts are amoung the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted;brain over heart, surface:nowhere hating or to fear;shadow,mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making;only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence;never to rest and never to have;only to grow.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question

E.E. CUMMINGS

Tags: e.e. cummings, introduction, poetry, snobs

I have been writing. Just in very small form.

7-7-10:
Raw temptation of
sprinklers never fades with age…
Wet grass loves bare feet

7-1-10:
Red-winged blackbird dreams,
Bicycles, reeds in ditches,
was this history?

6-16-10:
Blame music, you could
never live up to sacred
memories of you

June 3, 2010:
‘Late submission’
Priorities change.
Scarlett in the cotton field,
painted backdrop skies.

4-26-10:
Will said there’s a tide,
Take this current. I meant to.
Don’t know what went wrong.

April 19, 2010:
‘Social studies’
At 9, I colored
my state bird blue. The kids laughed.
I still think I’m right.

Tags: haiku

“Music is like girlfriends to me; I’m continually astonished by the choices other people make.” –DLR

Tags: DLR, quote

He who knows how will always work for he who knows why. –Diamond Dave

Tags: DLR, QOTD

“There’s a little Van Halen in all of us, and we’re just trying to bring it out. It’s like something bursts inside of you, something that makes you not care what people around you are thinking. It makes you invincible, like if a car hit you, nothing would happen to you. That experience is about the audience, not us. All we do is provide the soundtrack.” –DLR

Tags: DLR, quote

I had the first couple of lines, with their curious, beautiful syntax, stuck in my head today. I struggled to recall where they were from. Shakespeare, obviously, but where? One of the plays with end-rhymed soliloquies? That narrows it, but contextually, they could fit in many places. Shakespeare is full of suitable matches.

I had to Google it.

And it makes me wonder how long it will be before my memory diminishes further. When I stop remembering even that it’s Shakespeare. Or will I stop remembering these snatches of lovely phrases at all?

On that depressing note, here it is.

Shakespeare–Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love ’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

any open show of affection is in bad taste. « Me against them.

Girls, we’ve been doing it all wrong. And this book was here the whole time…

[Thanks Alexis!]

Tags: culture, dating, vintage

Tags: bobseger, comments, future, Music