Hello, Thank you for joining me on a trip to: The Library of Failed Tastes Where We Read Jorge Luis Borges as an Ice Cream Cone that Gives Shape to Pinheads who Want to Be Heroic

We are quite fortunate to have such a library.

You may sleep here. Under these blankets, it seems there are only nursing
camels; what protrudes to be humps of transformation expand and contract like wooly lungs, the mounds of respiration. This is sacred now, because of problems with air, fear of taking a breath yet having to because the respiratory system is slow to change compared to the need for it to change.

Those who come here crave the tactile, these old pages flake upon contact with our fingers. As if we process tobacco, believe in native trades again too late.

I don't know that depending on speciation will get us here, but were we camels, we would not be who we are now; we can remember a future we make of dromedary; hope (why shouldn't a camel have a turn at being savior outside deserts?), but the future won't need to resurrect us if it plans on going somewhere better which is how we got our dromedary destiny. There are books about this, but mostly abstracts.

Perhaps you are familiar with the

universe; that is an indeterminate number of galleries in the Library of Babel; perhaps you know of it and other
exquisite failures, many of which are also poetry. Failures I interject now, mindful that anything happening that is noticed is as interjection, arriving at oblique angles, able to disrupt so as to cause notice after which the event, transcribed into symbols and alphabet of memory, merges into pages of time and existence, and the infinity, always infinite continues to be infinite though now is made of more pieces so is a larger infinity though the hands involved are those of

Jorge Luis Borges, for whom I imagine an ancient beast of typewriter, paper eating-insects with mandibles carved into the shapes of the characters, especially (I am attracted to this one) the ruined smile of tilde, insects that the writer feeds by typing The Book of Sand, the insects biting the words into the paper. It is quite beautiful really (a replacement revelation for the much older one on Patmos that is so famous it no longer works for me), except perhaps for the fastening of the insects (at the thorax) to the typebars, leaving their legs free to conduct only the music of frustration and desperation, music easy for some to not hear, but that music, even if beautiful, as suffering can be in how it perfects some (many of the Patmos-committed) for salvation, establishes worthiness, is christlike and beneficial, is SOP in nonviolent protest, is a dignity of aging and degrading infinitely in some infinite systems, in some galleries of the library.

Here is some further more complex beauty: that music of captive insect frustration and desperation, that invisible sonic milk:

(milk for being of tortured necessity, as when birth occurs as rebellion against circumstance, when there are hostages of human inability to figure out what to do with variety so overwhelming in its apparent endlessness, a slap in the face of the conformity that more easily could support the bland harmony of consensus); that sonic milk is overcome by using manicure scissors that have a blunt rather bulbous tip somewhat like the tip of mouth of a bottlenose dolphin that can also be made to perform —there are books about this in the Library of Babel is inside The Book of Sand (I will try to explain as I give this

Book of Sand
to you), but nowhere in this motel-provided Gideon's Bible something entirely unacceptable to me, so the shortcomings of the Bible are obvious, and persist in translation after translation. But it reflects the knowledge of the circumstances of its writing, including point of view, and maybe, as I have, you’ve had enough history lessons. The Library of Babel inside The Book of Sand must constantly remake itself. That is the advantage of its substance, the sand is easily reconfigurable, the biblical dunes of it like unsuccessful dromedary humps shift, move (alive with insect alphabets), so all information is dynamic, and has memory so can return, only for a limited time, to a prior configuration for comparative studies and both healthy and unhealthy forms of nostalgia.

I’m sorry to have said all this without first saying hello, but I’m so eager to give you this
Secret Books before it turns all to sand for another reconfiguration. And I want something of this exchange in this motel (somewhere in either forms of space, cyberspace, through a trail of IP addresses leading to, ultimately, a location [unnamed deliberately] where this would be banned, and physical space where we spiral along in the arm of galaxy whose central engine might be a supermassive black hole: a form of quantum quicksand) to appear not quite legal yet be thoroughly ethical. Hello. Take it. My hands are cupped around it as if I prevent something from flying away and in the act of prevention experience a mildly abrasive pleasure as insect wings vibrate and scrape my palms, erasing one fortune and replacing it with another, each replacement increasingly more accurate as time takes me closer to inevitability. In my hands, the words bitten into paper are insects themselves, have grown from eggs deposited in the bites when Borges typed because, and have hatched winged with an epidemic of possibilities. Nothing infects the library more, and when the sand hatches, perhaps it will be clearer that somehow the library already contains all books written and all books to be written, it is a library of all possibilities of alphabet inside
The Book of Sand. Embedded in the alphabet is the possibility for all words, all sentences, all books; a matter of configuration and adjustment —that’s all. That’s why I give in this one book (translated from Borges’ Spanish by Andrew Hurley) every book. The Bible has but 66, impressive to some, but only 66. And it is bound. What I give you is unbound. Unfettered. Look at this page of it that is also an ant farm habitat in The Secret Books, a photographic translation of The Book of Sand and other
Borges; writings by Sean Kernan (look quickly; I do not have permission other than necessity to give you any but a limited [what they all are in a truth this library understands] look, a limited exposure): Also look at
Strawbridge

Eileen Joy; teaches, has taught such work also.

from Amazon, this:

I would have cut out the words, and used them all as fruit to attach to branches of miniature trees (alternate display mode for insect collections) I would have made out of the pale beige paper backgrounds returned to pulp in a cheap blender (so that the paper would look as if I’d chewed it [my inner insects active from so much reading] to extract the juice of information, a diet of a potential for poetry present in alternate arrangements of words that chewing itself might accidentally and temporarily locate). Surely this is connection to wasps whose books are hives, whose library is a corner of my garage.



Sean Kernan - The Secret Books

I caution you that in the infinity of the Library of Babel inside
The Book of Sand, every language is encountered; pages and pages, volumes and volumes in the language of the Voynich Manuscript of which what I’ve written here is a failed translation. Some purpose (the portion that approaches an unattainable noble elevation) of metaphor has been to teach appreciation of failure, the joy of the blessed inexactitude that is translation, the little useful mutations that occur in approximation, sponsoring evolutions. Let's say that
a model of this universe; is as a series of umbrellas opening inside another, stretching, elongating this universe into, what amounts to, a series of universes. Let's imagine an opener --perhaps you (why not?) --or forkergirl, if you prefer (or even if you don't --could be that forkergirl spends her time opening umbrellas) as when she imagines universes; as places to go.

The first place that I could go to alone was the

library; when I was seven and still in the city into which I was born. I thought of the building on Superior Avenue as a book itself monster book whose windows were compound eyes and whose ornate door was a mouth. It wanted to consume. As do books. Mutual consumption of reader and reading material. Don’t be deceived even by forms of books whose volume seems measurable. A certain number of pages, deceitful numbers doing their job, pitiful as it is in infinities where much numbering is cosmetic, for you may turn to any page even when pages are apparently finite —and how that finite number of pages is experienced may be infinite also. The materiality of pages seems determined, yet over time will degrade: pages will become as sand, as fodder for hourglasses, my Pretty. That too is translation. Even on presumably static pages: words that move; my ideas open them, twist them, unfold them (sometimes in a scene from The Silence of the Lambs; where I too am crime-busting entomologist) and continue unfolding what has been unfolded, the page able to accommodate eruptions of additional story-mass, extended continental ant farms where, on some of them, quicksand emerges.

This happened even with the Bible. I couldn’t keep other books out. Right in the middle of
David and Goliath
David and Goliath were passages about the Princess and the Goblin, the Princess and the Pea. And while the ark was afloat, there were mermaids and dolphins becoming interchangeable silhouettes in moonlight that kept writing fictions inside gospels. Glorious fictions including the most glorious: Borges’ ficciones.

What I really give you is the Book of Quicksand. I hope that in accepting it, you’ll be sucked into its endlessness where I am. The sandstorms are pure seduction. I’ve not experienced quicksand other than observing it in Tarzan movies and in books where lines of text become segments of vines easily entangled with Harold’s purple crayon line

(Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson;) and all other veins and arteries. A haven of
blood-suckers. I spent the night once in Virginia in the sitting room of a bed and breakfast house with only books and more than fifty, it seemed, eastern blood-sucking conenoses as bibliography and footnotes. They (related to this one from amazingdata.com) came in through the compound-eyed windows that I couldn’t close. Not to mention the tantalizing scant movements of gauze curtains of lashes. You won’t drown in this quicksand except in imagination, so don’t construct a drowning scenario if you don’t want to drown, but construct it well if you do. Quicksand offers an apparent change in volume by messing with solidity, spreading out colloidal welcome mats in a warping of solidity in which the Book of Quicksand becomes a shuttle into and out of arrangements of infinities (possibilities) of the Library of Babel inside it.

Every word, every letter is a
a trapdoor;. Every idea is quicksand.

And a hot desert, sooner or later, with all that sand, has access to the most heaven.

I'm Still Here

Whitney's gone, but I'm still here
(hoping to take advantage of this gift)

(--maybe the world needed or wanted Whitney more --
but she is gone, and I remain to do what I can --but I can't sing as she did, certainly not at the peak of her career in the 80's and early 90's, but perhaps I'll do what I can --what more or else?  I expect to fall short, human that I am without choice or argument).

Whitney's gone

(but I'm not, not that our lives should be conflated;
I would/will disappear without fanfare or even notice beyond my family & employer, maybe a few friends from neighborhoods where I've lived; a handful of doctors who may still wonder a bit exactly who I am/was).

What should I do with this  extra time that is mine
--not that I really believe that I have extra time;
I don't think my time on earth has lengthened; I don't think that suddenly I have skills previously lacking, but I can see (a little) more of my son --I hope at least another 20 years though the world may be gone, and I may have entered another dimension presently (though not necessarily forever) inaccessible from here.  Perhaps climate changes will make the planet inhospitable to life as humanity has known it and has come to expect it (with some religious-based differences).

Will there be enough food and and clean, fresh water?
Something that has led to me has been here since life on Earth began, so I may have descendants who will struggle  to survive (along with all other lifeforms), but the easy ride (fortunately, humanity did not have to share this world with dinosaurs, but recent work suggests --pretty much confirms for me-- that birds are descendants of dinosaurs and that some of these past  lizards may have been feathered --the male t-Rex may have been quite a bit more familial --caring, involved with rearing young
t-rexes, etc. He may have stayed with the nest, protecting it, decorating it, etc).  He may have been one of the early gardeners.

I don't know what kind of gardener Whitney was (or in more time would have become).

I am not (never have been) noted for my gardening.

(image from Amazon) --I do have a piece in Colors of Nature, p. 743: Tarsenna's Defiance Garden in which I Love to Spit.

I did receive a small plot to care for long ago as part of the Moses Cleaveland school gardening program).  My mother has performed more admirably with plants; she deserves an award from me (my father is no longer here to award her personally, but she believes she'll be reunited with him --and with all others who have departed
--including  Whitney, Tarsenna, and the dinosaurs).

World Hunger

Hunger is a major problem in the world. Many are hungry without awareness from parts of the world where food seems not to be a problem, is even thrown away without anyone attempting to consume it. Parents --or rather-- my mother would tell me to think of the starving children in Africa,as if that would make me clean my plate.


The Huffington Post reports Hillary Clinton as saying this about hunger.

This morning, one billion people around the world woke up hungry and tonight, they will go to sleep hungry. This issue has not gotten the attention it deserves, and it is a personal priority of mine and of the Obama Administration to address the challenge of chronic hunger with a very high level of focus and dedication.

Hunger is not only a physical condition. It is a drain on economic development, a threat to global security, a barrier to health and education reform, and a trap for the millions of people worldwide who work from sun-up to sun-down every day to produce a harvest that often doesn't meet their needs.

Today at the World Food Prize ceremony at the State Department, I am honoring Dr. Gebisa Ejeta, who has transformed farming in many parts of the world and saved millions of lives by identifying varieties of a key African crop resistant to drought and specific types of weeds.

We have the resources to give every person in the world the tools they need to feed themselves and their children. So the question is not whether we can end hunger. It's whether we will.

The Obama Administration is committed to providing leadership in developing a new global approach to hunger. We will look to 7 guiding principles to support the creation of effective, sustainable farming systems in regions around the world where the current methods aren't working:

We will seek to increase agricultural productivity, by expanding access to quality seeds, fertilizers, irrigation tools, and the credit to purchase them and training to use them.
We will work to stimulate the private sector, by improving the storage and processing of food and improving roads and transportation so small farmers can sell the fruits of their labor at local markets.
We are committed to maintaining natural resources, so the land can be farmed well into the future. That includes helping developing communities adapt to climate change, which has had a major effect on the world's farms.
We will expand knowledge and training by supporting R&D and cultivating the next generation of plant scientists.
We will seek to increase trade so small-scale farmers can sell their crops far and wide.
We will support policy reform and good governance, because sustainable agriculture flourishes in a clear and predictable policy and regulatory environment.
We will support women and families. 70% of the world's farmers are women, but most programs that offer farmers credit and training target men. This is unfair and impractical. An effective agricultural system must have incentives for those who do the work. And it must take into account the particular needs of those whose futures will shape our world: our children.
These seven principles will guide us and help us set benchmarks to measure the impact of our efforts. We are committed to collecting data, assessing our progress, and when necessary, correcting our course.

Supporting sustainable agriculture won't be a side project of the Obama Administration. Attacking hunger at its roots will directly impact whether we meet our foreign policy goals and I invite each and every one of you to join this effort.

__________________________
However, knowledge alone has not/will not/can not save us.
Knowledge includes religion.

If hungry people know more about agriculture, that knowledge may help alleviate some of their hunger. Seeds, fertilizer, maybe even soils may be needed to improve who, where, and how food grows. What, however, will make these agricultural areas sustainable? Does this idea take into account what may be happening? say, if global warming is in progress now? Are not polar bears running out of space to live as they are accustomed to live? in the north, meeting once again the grizzlies that may be responsible for the emergence of polar bears —ancestors of polar bears? The grizzpos, and polies that result from some of these meetings, new breeds forced into existence as the earth warms to temperatures not exactly hospitable to humanity, closer to the ways to was before humanity emerged, eventually to dominate for a while.

How far north will insects travel? Will birds that currently migrate south during northern winters stay in Michigan year-round? Will we take more interest in eating what presently is not considered food? Food is not universal anyway; what's eaten in one location may not be (readily) eaten in another location --I think a bit of Bourdain, and Zimmern
We do tend to be food snobs.

And Then there's the matter of our own star, the sun that will stop shining one day, (not scheduled till long after anyone alive now is gone).