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It’s been three years. Your scent still lingers; // your scent gone and yet never ending. / But now you’re gone, never to return – Li Po – The Selected Poems, 1996 p18
Numbers are to mathematicians
What words are to poets
Stanzas and formulas
Are synonymous
Fibonacci all in a row
At the carnival
It all adds up
A poem has symmetries
Words have recursive sequences
The order is not random
This can be proven
They are interrelated
I am elated
A formula does exist
My proof consists in showing
That an infinite sequence
Can be captured by
Something finite
And so now maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world – Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places, 20 p203
Factoid: Contractors now compose 69% of the US Department of Defense’s workforce. At present there are 104,000 contractors in Afghanistan. The number of Defense contractors there rose by 40% between June 2006 and September 2009. The number of armed contractors there doubled during that time period from 5,000 to 10,000. With the coming surge there will be an additional 56,000 in the country. There are also a number on none Department of Defense contractors there (3,600 Department of State and 14,000 USAID). A year from now the likely number of US-funded civilian personal on the ground in Afghanistan may exceed 220,000 and costing in excess of $16 billion a year
Our armies moving down White-Ascent Road, / Mongols probing along Sky-Blue Seas - // Soldiers never return from those forced / marches ending on battlefields. Countless // guards lookout across moonlit borderland / thinking of home, their faces all grief – Li Po – The Selected Poems, 1996 p26
Where power and expertise coincide, there truth will be self-evident
It’s no surprise, Eastern seas become / Western streams shallow and clear, // or the melon-grower at Ch’ing Gate / once reigned as Duke of Tung-ling – Li Po – The Selected Poems, 1996 p30
Searching for historical analogies we latch onto historical themes intuitively: French collaboration, inter-war Britain, the American dis-union. We plunder the past to gain knowledge about the present but understand neither. But at least we are not ignorant – we have analogous situations.
That winter hour, upon the summit ridge with the stars falling plainly far above, it seemed to me that our estrangement from the dark was a great and serious loss. We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity – Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places, 2009 p203
How sad that time should be
So momentous
So as not to be allowed to write
About the mundane
We are making history and this
Is no time to waste
With nonsense
What a lose that one cannot
Eat history
Or that I cannot embrace the hero
Who is made of steel
No one understands now. Those who could / hear a song this deeply vanished long ago – Li Po – The Selected Poems, 1996 Po p28
Factoid: Between 1680 and 1820 the flow of migrants across the Atlantic included about five African slaves for every European settler
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