Fortune
And at late-meal tonight, fortune cookies. Mine read:
“Guide yourself accordionly”
The lessons start tomorrow.
Leave him alone
First time I came upon a snake in the wild, I thought it was dead; I wasn't afraid. It wasn't dead.
Second time I saw a snake in the wild I was indeed afraid. Enraptured, but frightened stiff. It slowly coiled out of sight, leaving me, and I was frightened and powerless to stop it.
Oh let the man be alone. Let him—if nothing else—possess himself in silence. For in the cogged and running vessels of the city, there is only noise, only the lifeless static, ever-going hupala of white mentality: meaningless, once a man dies. Meaningless because it has sold out his life while he lived. And when he is dead, when silence itself has been silenced, there is nothing not even a blackness, not even oblivion. It is only the quite final, the quite-the-end.
For life is dying, dying on us, going out. Life, that is only for a time, before the spark is extinguished, hailstorms of death knock it out. No God, no Buddah, can ever put back life, once it has been forced out. Death is the undone; it cannot itself be un-undone.
So our cities, which are not life, which are the un-life, they drain us out, they kill us, and never will they give us a gulp of our own life-throb, nothing more than a parched skeleton-sip.
So let, I say, let the man be alone—at least awhile. Let him be wordless, if only awhile. Soon he will die and will have lost his chance.
And the only one a man gets.
Siren
Sing me your siren song!
Sing me your siren song!
Oh sing me your siren song—sing!
Sing all day long!
When the man and the woman are flames
flames licking raptuously at each other
licking of the loins, flame-licking
at the wild, dark center
Ah for the blindness of a flower in spring!
Swish
I like this poem of mine:
Swish
I know now, know now, the final swish
that moves my life so slowly—oh so slowly—
on its way. Is a swish, a swish of the secret
silver contract made with the moon
by a people I wasn't even born yet.
But the contract is mine
as much in turn it was theirs.
And I will do my duty—even if it means
following mapless a sky I do not know,
whose stars are strange to me.
But follow I will as I have to
in the trip of life that is hardly a trip,
hardly a going anywhere or a getting
to any particular place on time—
even if there were maps at every station.
So I trace after the swish
the sweep of the moon; its endless charting
cycleless, lineless, only a turning
from something to something.
Bertrand Russell on Nakedness
I don't mean to always condemn Bertrand Russell. He is, after all, a very wise man, has written much truth. Here is something from Marriage & Morals:
The taboo against nakedness is an obstacle to a decent attitude on the subject of sex. Where young children are concerned, this is now recognized by many people. It is good for children to see each other and their parents naked whenever it so happens naturally. There will be a short period, probably at about three years old, when the child in interested in the difference between his father and his mother, and compares them with the differences between himself and his sister, but this period is soon over, and after this he takes no more interest in nudity than in clothes. So long as parents are unwilling to be seen naked by their children, the children will necessarily have a sense that there is a mystery, and having that sense they will become prurient and indecent. There is only one way to avoid indecency, and that is to avoid mystery. There are also many important grounds of health in favor of nudity in suitable circumstances, such as out of doors in sunny weather. Sunshine on the bare skin has an exceedingly health-giving effect. Moreover, anyone who has watched children running about in the open air without clothes must have been struck by the fact that they hold themselves much better and move more freely and more gracefully than when they are dressed. The same thing is true of grown-up people. The proper place for nudity is out of doors in the sunshine and in the water. If our conventions allowed of this, it would soon cease to make any sexual appeal; we should all hold ourselves better, we should be healthier from the contact of air and sun with the skin, and our standards of beauty would more nearly coincide with standards of health, since they would concern themselves with the body and its carriage, not only with the face. In this respect the practice of the Greeks was to be commended.
And we commend you, Mr. Russell . . . at least on this subject.
Bleeding Hearts
“The problem with you is that you wear your heart on your sleeve.”
“You wear yours in your briefcase.”
