Blow out the candles

Today's topic: wishes

• what they do and how they function
• what happens (a) when they are snuffed out (b) when we drop them in the laps of unsuspecting strangers (c) when we leave them on stoops, ring the bells, and run (d) when we leave them unattended in shopping carts at the mall (e) when they are too small to be seen with the naked eye (f) when they are too large to fit into a #10 envelope and hence require additional postage (g) when they get covered in cat hair (h) when they are lonely (i) when we miss them (j) when we turn them into prayers (k) when they hover in the corner and won't go to bed (l) when they are pink (m) when they are brittle (o) when one comes back to haunt you (p) when they turn into a balloons and float away (q) when they insist on wearing leather jackets (r) when they insist on dressing like toursits (s) when they refuse to split up (t) when they have gender identity crises (u) when they turn into poems (v) when they don't turn into poems (w) when they grow mould (x) when they turn into fetishes (y) when they whisper (z) when they shout.

The Dickinsonian oracle blows out the candles:

When Etna basks and purrs
Naples is more afraid
Than when she shows her Garnet Tooth -
Security is loud -
(E. Dickinson, 1161)

Time pinches

What to do when time pinches, and you just cannot squeeze into a second/minute/hour/morning/day/weekend/week all that that is jumping up and down to get done:

1) go for a run. Einstein said something about moving quickly and altering time. So be a physicist and hit the road with your running shoes and iPod.

2) scream. This feels good.

3) get to work. This is effective.

4) have a snack, scream, then get to work. This makes feeling good and being effective tasty.

On this pinched-up day, the Dickinsonian Oracle offers its own sage advice:

Forever - is composed of Nows -
'Tis not a different time -
Except for Infiniteness -
And Latitude of Home -

From this - experienced Here -
Remove the Dates - to These -
Let Months dissolve in further Months -
And Years - exhale in Years -

Without Debate - or Pause -
Or Celebrated Days -
No different Our Years would be
From Anno Dominies -
(E. Dickinson, 690)

Hope, and the fine

And so the philosopher asks:

How might you live (not so much what would you do, but what constitutes "going on" in a meaningful sense, what would make going on possible) facing the quite real chance of the collapse of the world as you know it, when the ideas around which you've established your worldview, and which undergird your very subjectivity, not only fail to be recognized by others but are utterly unavailable for recognition, are no longer viable, have evaporated, and hence no longer make sense (indeed, can no longer make sense), even to you?

And the philosopher answers:

Courage: hope + a reaching toward a transcendent goodness, the nature of which you cannot now understand + a vision of the fine.

The Dickinsonian oracle ponders:

Presentiment - is that long shadow - on the Lawn -
Indicative that Suns go down -

The notice to the startled Grass
That Darkness - is about to pass -
(E. Dickinson, 487)

Words that sound

Words that sound skittery together:

supervenience
scuffler
seethe

Set up a rumble in the blood. Good for mornings, or other laggings.

Here's some frisson from the Dickinsonian oracle:

That distance was between Us
That is not Mile or Main -
The Will it is that situates -
Equator - never can -
(E. Dickinson, 906)

A mushroom is a mush, is a room

Something fungal is happening in the slightly damp but nevertheless also somewhat sunny southwest metropolis and this thing is mushrooms. Out of nowhere, it seems, mushrooms have sprung up on tree lawns and grassy residential plots. Little ones, saucer-sized ones, ones with bumps and ones with ruffles, dark brown ones and creamy white ones. "What the heck?" you might ask yourself, and never get an answer. The urban mushrooms just come. Of course, Sylvia Plath seems to know something of the phenomenological life of mushrooms. In her mushy, roomful poem "Mushrooms," the little mushrooms murmur in the fungus-light:

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

And what does the Dickinsonian oracle think of mushrooms? In short:

Warm in her Hand these accents lie
While faithful and afar
The Grace so awkward for her sake
It's fond subjection wear -
(E. Dickinson, 1307)

Hope and its feathers

For those suffering from the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina:

"Hope" is a thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I've heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extreminty,
It asked a crumb - of me.
(E. Dickinson, 314)

We heart NYC

Though there is such grieving down in the steamy south and across the wide world, and any reference to personal good-fortune seems like egomaniacal self-indulgence, one can't help but celebrate NYC. When one's beloved goes to NYC for the weekend and brings back a dozen marvelous bagels, most everything seems marvelous. And when one's beloved goes to NYC and brings back NYC Rooftop Beelicious Honey, made the by busy urban honey bees of the greatest metropolis in the world, especially when the honey is passed along by a marvelous NYC East Village-dwelling friend by the name of Cookie, even more things seem simply marvelous. What about those bees? They sure are busy. As is their man.

In the words of a girl who loved honey herself, the Dickinsonian oracle celebrates NYC:

Angels, in the early morning
May be seen the Dews among,
Stooping - plucking - smiling - flying -
Do the Buds to them belong?

Angels, when the sun is hottest
May be seen the sands among,
Stooping - plucking - sighing - flying -
Parched the flowers they bear along.
(E. Dickinson, 73)

Smart girls say it on it

That Molly Ivins; she's one smart missy.

The Dickinsonian oracle says it on it, too:

Size circumscribes - it has no room
For petty furniture -
The Giant tolerates no Gnat
For Ease of Gianture -

Repudiates it, all the more -
Because intrinsic size
Ignores the possibility
Of Calumnies - or Flies -
(E. Dickinson, 707)

Add a consonant and stir

Poet Harry Matthews, in response to a gauntlet thrown down by the ever-poetical Kenneth Koch, wrote a poem beginning with a tampered line from Shakespeare's sonnet "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day." The tampering consisted in the slight-of-hand swapping of a "b" for a "d," such that the poem compares the ubiquitous thee to a summer's bay. While not stunning, Matthews poem "Lateral Disregard" has a grace about it, with its languid hours and curious fish.

Here are a few tampered first lines from a few of Wyatt's sonnets. Make some grace.

"Unstabled dream according to the place"
"Though I myself be brindled of my mind"
"Because I still kept thee from flies and flame"

On swapping consonants, the Dickinsonian oracle recommends:

Low at my problem bending,
Another problem comes -
Larger than mine - serener -
Involving statelier sums.

I check my busy pencil -
My fingers file away -
Wherefore, my baffled fingers
Thy perplexity?

New shoes and notebooks

Something always seems off when the week starts on Tuesday (though I recognize the joy this brings to many cubicle-bound drones and other worker bees). But for me... I feel behind already, and it is a scary week. The whole pomp(pous) and circumstance rigmarole begins to churn on Thursday and the dreams in which I have to teach a class on who-knows-what (though the dream students are thoroughly prepared) once again roll into dreamland on a regularly scheduled basis. Scary.

Today's Dickinsonian oracle soothes the professorial soul thusly:

If What we could - were what we would -
Criterion - be small -
It is the Ultimate of Talk -
The Impotence to Tell -
(E. Dickinson, 540)

Learn about it; object

Find out the truth

And the Dickinsonian oracle pronounces its own truth about those effected seriously by Katrina's destruction:

Let my first knowing be of thee
With morning's warming Light -
And my first Fearing, lest Unknowns
Engulph thee in the night -
(E. Dickinson, 1254)

Bereave

Bereavement in their death to feel
Whom We have never seen -
A Vital Kinsmanship import
Our Soul and their's between -

For Stranger - Strangers do not mourn -
There be Immortal friends
Whom Death see first - 'tis news of this
That paralyze Ourselves -

Who - vital only to Our Thought -
Such Presence bear away
In dying - 'tis as if Our souls
Absconded - suddenly -
(E. Dickinson, 756)

Heavy burden

It seems impossible for the marigolds to be blooming, the breeze breezing, and the geese beginning their exodus here in the sun-suckered metropolis while such grief soaks the gulf coast and its people. Even those who don't pray might send some compassionate vibes down south in sympathy for the heavy burden of others, especially the burdens of the poor, who always bear more than they deserve.

In solidarity, the Dickinsonian oracle offers this:

We pray - to Heaven -
We prate - of Heaven -
Relate - when Neighbors die -
At what o'clock to Heaven - they fled -
Who saw them - Wherefore fly?

Is Heaven a Place - a Sky - a Tree?
Location's narrow way is for Ourselves -
Unto the Dead
There's no Geography -

But State - Endowal - Focus -
Where - Omnipresence - fly?
(E. Dickinson, 476)