Infinite Substitution - Whales or Minnows Its Just a Matter of Scale

The tide takes them out and on. They were spawned. They were teeming. Now they are gone,  just a phosphorescent wake behind the ship. Whales in the Antarctic gulp them by the millions. They will return. You would thing that we would love all of this abundance, but such profundity is abhorrent to us.  Neo-liberal economics proclaims everything is infinitely substitutable. But this is too extreme for our sense of the primacy of the individual. But this is life. They are alive. I know nothing of their reality. But nothing is never enough. Consume. There is no contentment on land. The ebb and the flow, the rip and the neap, bring flotsam and jetsam. Suds form a border between the solid and the liquid. Fumes form the boundary of liquid and gas. The masses are corrosive. Everything is reduced to rubble. Everything is subtle. Everything ends.

I trust hatred more than love, It is frequently constructive, despite the propaganda to the contrary; it is less frequently practiced by hypocrites; it is more clearly understood; it is painfully purchased, and therefore often earned – William H Gass – A Temple of Texts, 2006 p44

Basketball will never be the same, will it? Watching TV in the customer service lounge. He was caught off guard. Nope, he replied, everyone has his traditions. Not any more, his interlocutor replied, it’s just about the dollars. Making conversation – sports – locomotives on opposite courses – freight trains passing in the night – at least it is better than the weather. It is raining.  Sense can be made out of anything said. It’s the masculine  answer to poetry. Women have the minutia of daily life to discuss. What's it suppose to be like today. Rain. All day? Well let up by noon.

“Shut up!” he explained – Ring Lardner

There were seven Amana colonies and  hills in Rome and wonders of the world - both ancient and modern. Seven each. Seven stages of knowledge and seven virtues. I think we can take the blue pencil to the ten commandments and get them down to seven too - the seven deadly sins. On second thought, I thing we already have. The seven days of the week. The seven founding fathers. 

Drenched in data, fantasy becomes reality – William H Gass – A Temple of Texts, 2006 p234

There’s power

            In a well tailored

            Suit

It’s not the man

            But how he

            Cuts his cloth

There is power

            In a man

            Wearing

A well tailored

            Suit

Naked innocence

            Walking

Defiling all

            Empathy
Arousing jealousy

It is only a clumsy and erroneous form of perception which places everything in the object, when really everything is in the mind – Marcel Proust – Tine Regained p244

The event sits at the mid-point of the time-line

Every epoch chooses its own past and cannot know how it will be remembered – Guy Davenport – The Hunter Graacchus, 1996 p88

She tried on the analogy

She said it fit like the

            Leaning Tower of Pisa

Corridors are circular

It was like, I thought,

            She was trying

            On many colored

                        Winter coats

It is all so hazy

            Lying in the hospital

Its so unnatural and yet

            So natural

                       To die

The corridors climbed

            Higher and higher

Soon we reached the top

            Of the west tower

            And stretched our hands

                        Skyward

Towards the night stars
                        Touched them
They were cold and metallic
 Licked them with our tongues

Facts which are dumb, resonate when they enter fiction, and fantasies, when acted on, become factified – William H Gass – A Temple of Texts, 2006  p234

Prose makes the words conform to the world; while poetry makes the world conform to the words

Poetry and magic see the world from opposite ends / one cock-forward and the other ass-forward – Jack Spicer – The Collected Books, 1996 p189

Hello lady, what’s your name?

            Why does it rain? I’m so blue

Hello Lorrain, let it pour

            The train is overdue

It has just arrived at track number nine.

Lorrain is waiting there in the drizzle

            With a blue umbrella

The logic of passion, even if it happens to be in the service of the best possible cause, is never irrefutable for the man who is not himself passionate – Marcel Proust – Tine Regained p93

Of the world’s thirty largest shopping malls, only three are in the United States

You must pay attention; but you can pay attention to anything – William H Gass – A Temple of Texts, 2006 p274

Coal trains

            Thirty

Times a day

Come along

            Come along

                        Come along

Thirty

            Times today

Amtrak

            On time

Freight train

            GO So Slow

Commodities (HFCS from corn)

            On track
            In time
                         (soda in cans)

Re-set your watch to

           Global time

The good books are cookbooks and good readers read them, try them, stain their pages, adjust ingredients, pencil in evalutaitons, warn and recommend their recipes to friends – William H Gass – A Temple of Texts, 2006 p6