Over the hill and far awayOver the hill and far away
“Ordinary men commonly condemn what is beyond them.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
It can happen at any ageIt can happen at any age
“Most young people think they are natural when they are only boorish and rude.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
ClarifiedClarified
Squirrels in West Rogers Park
are fat. Skin ’em and gut ’em
and stuff ’em with cloves of sauteed
garlic. Sprinkle with black
pepper. Wrap ’em in foil.
Set ’em to baking in the coals.
They come out all juicy, the meat
melting off the bones. The skulls
can be dipped in clarified
butter and eaten whole.
They make a crowd of oneThey make a crowd of one
“We hardly find any persons of good sense, save those who agree with us.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
It can knock us sillyIt can knock us silly
“Opportunity makes us known to others, but more to ourselves.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
Where the Danger LiesWhere the Danger Lies
Nine out of ten doctors
will tell you that the crazy guy
who gathers sopping newspapers off
the sidewalk in the rain while talking
to no one you can see about all
the reading he now has to do
is a crazy guy.
He stops talking when people
draw near, he’s not that crazy.
He knows where the danger lies.
Ten out of ten doctors
will tell you what they would have
done for or to or about
the crazy guy. Ten out of ten
of them will be wrong
and so will you.
It’s called “making lemonade”It’s called “making lemonade”
“To be a great man one should know how to profit by every phase of fortune.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
You can find them in the CongressYou can find them in the Congress
“If there be men whose folly has never appeared, it is because it has never been closely looked for.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
This one was got rightThis one was got right
Issue 13 of Robot Melon was published today. It contains one of my stories, “A Dog By the Ears.” Here’s the link:
http://www.robotmelon.com/issue13/tetmancallis.html
Chop the tall poppyChop the tall poppy
“Moderation is made a virtue to limit the ambition of the great; to console ordinary people for their small fortune and equally small ability.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
We’ll see how that measures upWe’ll see how that measures up
“It is as proper to be boastful alone as it is ridiculous to be so in company.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
A non-dischargeable debtA non-dischargeable debt
“We may forgive those who bore us, we cannot forgive those whom we bore.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
But he can get elected nonethelessBut he can get elected nonetheless
“No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
Unscrewing After the DreamingUnscrewing After the Dreaming
Usually, when a piece of mine is first published someplace else, I post a notice here on my blog, with a link to the someplace else. I also post the notice and link on Facebook. Then, about three months later, I add a copy of whatever it was to my previously published works on this site, with a notice of same posted again here on the main line.
Tonight is different. The aptly named Synchronized Chaos published one of my short prose pieces, “After the Dreaming,” on their website two weeks ago and so butchered it that I’m not posting a link to it here or on Facebook or anywhere else. What I’m doing is posting here the original unscrewed piece, so that all three of my readers may enjoy it in its pristine entitlement.
—
After the Dreaming
We woke up and found ourselves wearing clothing and carrying weapons, our women carrying babies on their hips as we wandered dry, sun-drenched plains on our way to gather in crowded cities and drink beer in cool, dark shops, gossip and grind grain by the city walls, watch the seasons and the pirouette of the stars. Calculating when to plant the corn, painting ourselves, hacking the gemstones, melting the ores and prostrating ourselves before ten thousand gods we sliced the hearts from endless rows of sacrificial victims captured by the soldiers arrayed in endless rows of the armies we found ourselves marching in when we woke up out of our infinite dreaming and into this endless nightmare.
That’s why we have lynchThat’s why we have lynch
“A quickness in believing evil without having sufficiently examined it, is the effect of pride and laziness. We wish to find the guilty, and we do not wish to trouble ourselves in examining the crime.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
Betrothed to FacebookBetrothed to Facebook
“We deceive ourselves if we believe that there are violent passions like ambition and love that can triumph over others. Idleness, languishing as she is, does not often fail in being mistress; she usurps authority over all the plans and actions of life; imperceptibly consuming and destroying both passions and virtues.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
Daphne GottliebDaphne Gottlieb
“the villagers
are yelling.
they are out
for blood.
you are not
a monster;
you want to
say, but you
do not have
language
for this
because you are
a monster, just
not the kind
they think.”
– Daphne Gottlieb, “double cross”
How low can you goHow low can you go
“Humility is often a feigned submission which we employ to supplant others. It is one of the devices of Pride to lower us to raise us; and truly pride transforms itself in a thousand ways, and is never so well disguised and more able to deceive than when it hides itself under the form of humility.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
Counting the HoursCounting the Hours
Hell in a very small place
is directly beneath my feet.
Las Hermanas de Las Dolorosas
live if you want to call it living
in the apartment below my soles.
Their bickering ends only
when one or both of them
lose or loses consciousness.
O to sleep
and not to scream.
They are up and at each other
at nine o’clock
ten o’clock
one forty-four
and five-thirty the following
morning. Sometimes I expect
to hear gunshots and hope
they don’t accidentally aim
at their ceiling. More likely
I think their impasse could
resolve with crashings of furniture
and smashings of glass and
wailings followed by
silence,
sirens,
and the news trucks showing
up outside on the street.
Most likely, though, it will
go on and on, the muffled
whine, the occasional shout,
no end in sight, two people
locked together forever
in their love and hate.
Sometimes it’s silenceSometimes it’s silence
“True eloquence consists in saying all that should be, not all that could be said.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
What’s the price of priceless?What’s the price of priceless?
“Sovereign ability consists in knowing the value of things.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
Daphne GottliebDaphne Gottlieb
“If you die, a dog will wait a week
before eating your corpse. A cat
will wait a day.”
– Daphne Gottlieb, “what you eat”
Sometimes you just gotta go way downSometimes you just gotta go way down
Daphne GottliebDaphne Gottlieb
“Some days I am the only
sane person in the world
and I get lonely.”
– Daphne Gottlieb, “open water”
CertificateCertificate
A woman sat in a canvas folding
chair by the lake. The day
was still and water calm. Mist
in the sky blurred the horizon.
She held her wallet in her lap. She
opened it and pulled out a folded
sheet of paper, unfolded it,
looked at it, a copy of her birth
certificate. She folded it, returned
it to her wallet, fingered her
drivers license there, closed her
wallet and looked out over the lake.
A few minutes later she opened her
wallet again, pulled her drivers
license out, looked at it, put it
back in her wallet, pulled her
birth certificate out again,
unfolded it and looked at it again.
She lightly ran her fingertips over
the names of her father and her mother,
folded the certificate, returned it to
her wallet and looked at the lake.
Yesterday she ran away from her
husband, literally, running down
the sidewalk in a light drizzle
on a street a few blocks from
the apartment where her father
died when she was seventeen. Two
pedestrians turned and watched as
she ran by. Further up the street,
her husband stood on the sidewalk
and he watched her go.
Tree falling in the forest, variation ∞Tree falling in the forest, variation ∞
”No one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for. Now let us imagine an extreme case: that a book speaks of nothing but events which lie outside the possibility of general or even of rare experience—that it is the first language for a new range of experiences. In this case simply nothing will be heard, with the acoustical illusion that where nothing is heard there is nothing,” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (trans. Hollingdale; emphasis in original)
And think of the student loan debt one accumulatesAnd think of the student loan debt one accumulates
“One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (trans. Hollingdale)
HardwoodHardwood
The downstairs neighbors are having
a bad day. Last night they had
a bad night. Yesterday, at least
during those parts of the day
when I was at home, they were
having a bad day. The night before
last, etc.
I try not to listen. (I want
to listen!) I try not to press
my ear against the floor and I
am almost always successful.
It hardly matters. This old
building is built like a honeycomb,
sound traveling well up and down
the cells. (They’re shouting now
below me—I want to listen!)
Even without pressing my ear
against the hardwood floor,
I can hear “Fuck!” and “I
told you!” and “Don’t” and
“Help me, you never help me,
I have to do all the fucking”
and then it trails off and
then the dogs bark. Yes, they
have dogs, two of them. They
bark. Sometimes they even howl.
“Fuck” is the word easiest
to hear in this honeycomb. It’s
like the punch of a fist.
Still doing what they canStill doing what they can
“Christianity robbed us of the harvest of the culture of the ancient world, it later went on to rob us of the harvest of the culture of Islam. The wonderful Moorish cultural world of Spain, more closely related to us at bottom, speaking more directly to our senses and taste, than Greece and Rome, was trampled down (—I do not say by what kind of feet—): why? because it was noble, because it owed its origin to manly instincts, because it said Yes to life even in the rare and exquisite treasures of Moorish life!… Later on, the Crusaders fought against something they would have done better to lie down in the dust before—a culture compared with which even our nineteenth century may well think itself very impoverished and very ‘late.’—They wanted booty, to be sure: the Orient was rich…. But let us not be prejudiced! The Crusades—higher piracy, that is all! German knighthood, Viking Knighthood at bottom, was there in its element: the Church knew only too well what German knighthood can be had for…. The German knights, always the ‘Switzers’ of the Church, always in the service of all the bad instincts of the Church—but well paid…. That it is precisely with the aid of German swords, German blood and courage, that the Church has carried on its deadly war against everything noble on earth! A host of painful questions arises at this point. The German aristocracy is virtually missing in the history of higher culture: one can guess the reason…. Christianity, alcohol—the two great means of corruption.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (trans. Hollingdale; emphases and ellipses in original)
They bruise easilyThey bruise easily
“A right is a privilege. The privilege of each is determined by the nature of his being. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life becomes harder and harder as it approaches the heights—the coldness increases, the responsibility increases. A high culture is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base, its very first prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The crafts, trade, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in a word the entire compass of professional activity, are in no way compatible with anything other than mediocrity in ability and desires; these things would be out of place among the élite, the instinct pertaining to them is as much opposed to aristocracy as it is to anarchy. To be a public utility, a cog, a function, is a natural vocation, it is not society, it is a kind of happiness of which the great majority are alone capable, which makes intelligent machines of them. For the mediocre it is happiness to be mediocre; mastery in one thing, specialization, is for them a natural instinct. It would be quite unworthy of a more profound mind to see an objection in mediocrity as such. It is even the prime requirement for the existence of exceptions; a high culture is conditional upon it. When an exceptional human being handles the mediocre more gently than he does himself or his equals, this is not merely politeness of the heart—it is simply his duty.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (trans. Hollingdale; emphases in original)