Epicurus

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Mohammed Hanif

from A Case of Exploding Mangoes
By Mohammed Hanif

Behind the cordons set up along the road by the police for this VIP procession, people stood and waited and guessed: a teenager anxious to continue his first ride on a Honda 70, a drunk husband ferociously chewing betel nuts to get rid of the smell before he got home, a horse buckling under the weight of too many passengers on the cart, the passengers cursing the cart driver for taking this route, the cart driver feeling the pins and needles in his legs begging for their overdue opium dose, a woman covered in a black burqa–the only body part visible her left breast feeding her infant child–a boy in a car trying to hold a girl’s hand on their first date, a seven-year-old selling dust-covered roasted chickpeas, an old water carrier hawking water out of a goatskin, a heroin addict eyeing his dealer stranded on the other side of the road, a mullah who would be late for the evening prayer, a gypsy woman selling bright pink baby chickens, an air force trainee officer in uniform in a Toyota Corolla being driven by a Dunhill-smoking civilian, a newspaper hawker screaming the day’s headlines, Singapore Airline’s crew in a van cracking jokes in three languages, a pair of home-delivery arms dealers fidgeting with their suitcases nervously, a third-year medical student planning to end his life by throwing himself on the rail tracks in anticipation of the Shalimar Express, a husband and wife on a motorbike returning from a fertility clinic, an illegal Bengali immigrant waiting to sell his kidney so that he could send money back home, a blind woman who had escaped prison in the morning and had spent all day trying to convince people that she was not a beggar, eleven teenagers dressed in white impatient to get to the field for their night cricket match, off-duty policemen waiting for free rides home, a bride in a rickshaw on her way to the beauty salon, an old man thrown out of his son’s home and determined to walk to his daughter’s house fifty miles away, a coolie from the railway station still wearing his red uniform and in a shopping bag carrying a glittering sari he’d change into that night, an abandoned cat sniffing her way back to her owner’s house, a black-turbaned truck driver singing a love song about his lover at the top of his voice, a bus full of trainee Lady Health Visitors headed for their night shift at a government hospital; as the smoke from idling engines mixed with the smog that descends on Islamabad at dusk, as their waiting hearts got to bursting point with anxiety, they all seemed to have one question on their minds: “Which one of our many rulers is this? If his security is so important, why don’t they just lock him up in the Arm House?”

Sophie Stephenson-Wright

Whalesong
by Sophie Stephenson-Wright

I boom-mumble I bass-blow
I hull-heavy I big/slow
I boat-bump I limpet-skin
I soft-sink I sky-swim
I sea-search I salt-swallow
I bone-backed I flute-follow
I gulf-cross I listen-talk
I moon-map I wave-walk
I tail-turn I time-keep
I ship-wreck I song-seek
I blue-blood I grumble-sing
I fish-heart I dream king

Editorial: As seen on the Underground.

History W4001

History W4001. Done. Finished. Fin. Finito. Book closed. Grades in. Goodnight, Irene.

Patience Lake

“Here Daddy, I made this for you.”  Tan orgulloso.

…the smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd…

Editorial: This colloquialism describes the rush actors get on stage. I love its poetry and the gist it evokes.

I am bowled over by the amount of energy we humans spend on our daily performances. We have so many roles to play: deli customer, brother-in-law, subway rider, employee, professor, sports fan, sonbrotherhusbandfather. It is endless. I find that in some instances I slide right into roles effortlessly—because they just are. Other times I need to pause and reset before the show can go on. Problems arise if I make the transition from role to role too quickly, for instance I can be too brusque when I go from coworker to adviser or from subway rider to father. But in all these roles, no matter how ordinary or extraordinary, if you can remember to breadth in, if you can remember to open your ears, the thrill of life (the smell… the roar…) is palpable.

Paul R. Ehrlich

The scale of the human socio-economic-political complex system is so large that it seriously interferes with the biospheric complex system upon which it is wholly dependent, and cultural evolution has been too slow to deal effectively with the resulting crisis.

Little Gidding

Little Gidding Church, Exterior, Present Time (1906)
Source: Adam G. Hyde, George Herbert and His Times, Metuen & Co, London: 1906.

Editorial: See previous post.

T. S. Eliot

Four Quartets (selection)
Quartet IV, ‘Little Gidding’, Part I
by T. S. Eliot

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

Editorial: This is Part I of ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth quarter of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’. The whole work has layers of meaning which can be explored and enjoyed. This selection speaks about this time of year (winter, the liturgical season of Advent, heading into Christmas), when movement and busyness are on the rise—we with our dumb spirits coming and going, seeking, wanting, hoping. It reminds us what to do and what profound things can follow. It is mesmerizing and mystical.  (Thanks to RTM for sharing).

Settlement

Koh Pannyi… Tongkil… Asyut… Dun Eochla… New locations added to Settlement.

William Butler Yeats

The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner (1893)
by William Butler Yeats

Although I shelter from the rain
Under a broken tree
My chair was nearest to the fire
In every company
That talked of love or politics,
Ere Time transfigured me.

Though lads are making pikes again
For some conspiracy,
And crazy rascals rage their fill
At human tyranny,
My contemplations are of Time
That has transfigured me.

There’s not a woman turns her face
Upon a broken tree,
And yet the beauties that I loved
Are in my memory;
I spit into the face of Time
That has transfigured me.

Brian Christian

Heliotropes
by Brian Christian

In America, redeye planes fly east from Los Angeles to New York between sunset and sunrise, collapsing the night. The flights west from New York to Los Angeles predominate during the day, stretching it open.

The mass of the American air fleet leaps at the sun, west as the sun heads west, and east as the sun, beneath them and over Asia, resets to east again.

Northern birds slosh down from the pole to the equator in the late months, while southern birds are sloshing from the equator down to the south pole for their spring.

We humans have made, with all our fires and all our fuels, the longitudinal version.

Looking at the earth from above, centering over the north pole, watch night and day sweep around. See (Fig. 1) the planes winging helter-skelter around the rim. Now fix the line of dark against light steady and let the land and water circle beneath it. Watch (Fig. 2) the planes, in a continual flow to sunrise from sunset, like two hands cupping the earth from her sides.

A friend of mine makes a hundred grand a year optimizing the algorithms that arrange flight plans. In contrast, Helianthus annuus doesn’t know it twists its florets in the Fibonacci sequence. Our economy bristles with efficiency, with individual wills building and buying, collaborating and competing by the millions. But from the long view—and just as base, just as elegant—a field of sunflower buds, craning for light.

Editorial: Helianthus annuus. Fibonacci sequence.

Jules-Alexis Muenier

La leçon de catéchisme (1890)
Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon
oil on canvas

Editorial: We are giving catechism a go. I have reservations that are admittedly abstract. The word itself is unfortunate– to sound down to. And while I like the idea of studying doctrines intellectually (in this case Christian doctrines), the thought of indoctrinating our daughter is rather off-putting. I am accepting the skepticism and discomfort as part of the process itself, which is why for now we are leaning in.

Kurt Vonnegut

Brilliant.

Zeitgeist as parent

Editorial: My six-year old daughter saw two turtles mating at a science museum and mentioned offhandedly that they were making baby turtles.  We have not talked with her all that much about procreation but the Zeitgeist does have a way of seeping everywhere—even into the minds of Kindergarteners.  My friend who was standing next to my daughter agreed that the turtles were probably making baby turtles and that was that.  Then just the other day my daughter and I were waiting on the curb at a crowded NYC bus stop when a double-long city bus pulled up with this exact Sundance advertisement plastered along its side.  If you have been in this spot before then you know what it feels like to have a huge, high-gloss advertisement like this one take over your entire field of vision.  As we shuffled towards the door of the bus and passed the shirtless gentleman with the high-tops and blindfold (sic) my daughter stopped dead in her tracks, gazing at the larger-than-life image.  When we finally boarded the bus a focused conversation began about who tends to like whom in this world.  My daughter reported that in her Kindergarten class “like” between her classmates went in four directions: Girls who like Girls (common); Boys who like Boys (also common); Girls who like Boys (somewhat common); Boys who like Girls (not common at all).  She then fell silent for a moment before making this point about the advertisement: Papa, the boys who like boys in that bed are going to need help from the girls to make babies.  

Thanks, Zeitgeist, for taking care of this one.  Persistence seems to be your best technique. 

Patience Lake

Look, Pa, there goes Grandpa’s ghost!

Editorial: Yesterday I was sitting in an airport Sbarro with my daughter at a small table along the edge of a concourse. We were sitting face-to-face. Walking towards us from behind my daughter I spied an older man with a slight limp, wispy gray hair, and tortoise-rimmed glasses. He was carrying a well-loved canvas tote and wore a familiar uniform: frayed khaki pants, pinpoint dress shirt, well-worn leather lace-up shoes, and of course a double-breasted navy blue blazer with bright gold buttons. Instantly I saw my father. I smiled to myself and thanked him silently for his visit. I also made the mental note that my father is a traveler in death and that it was idiotic of me to visualize him holed up in the firmament. As the traveler came abreast of our table, passed, and then entered my daughter’s field of vision she called out, Look, Pa, there goes Grandpa’s ghost! This dear child barely knew her grandfather and certainly never traveled with him. I smiled again. There went Grandpa’s ghost.

Cartoons

A second page has been added to this blog—Cartoons.  It holds my all-time favorite cartoons from The New Yorker.  Wiles of the Devil.  Say something.  City Mouse.  Doggie Hell.  Enjoy!

Donald Hall

The Things
by Donald Hall

When I walk in my house I see pictures,
bought long ago, framed and hanging
—de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore—
that I’ve cherished and stared at for years,
yet my eyes keep returning to the masters
of the trivial: a white stone perfectly round,
tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell,
a broken great-grandmother’s rocker,
a dead dog’s toy—valueless, unforgettable
detritus that my children will throw away
as I did my mother’s souvenirs of trips
with my dead father, Kodaks of kittens,
and bundles of cards from her mother Kate.

January 4, 2010, The New Yorker

Scotch Proverb

Take time while time is, for time will away.

A Collection of Scotch Proverbs. Collected by Pappity Stampoy. London, Printed by R.D. in the Year 1663 (page 49).

Bertolt Brecht

The Mask Of Evil
by Bertolt Brecht

On my wall hangs a Japanese carving,
The mask of an evil demon, lacquered in gold.
I see with sympathy
The swollen veins on his brow, showing
How exhausting it is to be evil.