Lucretius of puddle wow!

This is what Thylias Moss had to say about, in a nutshell, existence as a collaborative venture, about a shallow puddle being able to reflect the depth of an atmospheric ocean, about a partnership between compression and expansion, each taking the other into itself apparently simultaneously, perception determining which parameter dominates --the partnership is a flaw perhaps, an accident perhaps, my own weakness for the idea, but it functions well (my perception) as a source, somehow, of possibility:

POET'S PICK APRIL 5
Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
Selected by Thylias Moss
National Poetry Month 2007


Letter from the Editors

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Thylias Moss's Poetry Month Pick, April 4, 2007
from On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), Book One
(with some reference in my comment to a passage in Book four)
by Lucretius (c. 99 - c. 55 BCE)
as translated by Anthony M. Esolen

Now it's clear that nothing can be limited
Without something beyond for boundary, some
Point beyond which our sense can't follow it.
But you must admit that nothing exists beyond
This All; therefore it has no limit, no end.
Nor does it matter in what place you stand:
Take any point you like—you leave the whole
Unbounded in all regions equally.


A few lines later, this comes:

…I’ll follow you then; wherever
You place the shores, I ask, "What of the spear?
Where does it fly?" No end can be established;
Immensity prolongs the flight forever.


A passage that has followed, as has the other, this:


There's more: Nature dissolves all things into
Their atoms; things can't die back down to nothing.
…Never can things revert to nothingness!




Thylias Moss Comments:

How tempting to believe in innovation, in the poet making something new—I have needed this delusion myself, have in fact built something I dare call a "new literary paradigm" on the possibility of the new, yet one of the ancients had already made clear (in Latin) that "as all words share one alphabet, many things may be made from the same atoms," must be made from the same particles, hinting at some irreducible particle that exists in a finite number of basic forms, these combining to make all else, infinite variety within limits established by the nature of these particles, so human beings will not (in initial birth form) become an Andean peak or a pack of flamingos dancing in one of the rivers, perhaps a sulfurous one, at the feet of the Andes though some humans may do an

Irish step dance in which the legwork seems to invent the flamingo ritual pack dance again—could it be that certain patterns are inevitable given the close relationship between all stuff? We're made of elements repeating throughout an immensity available on every scale, Lucretius instructing his readers to venture to the shore, to the limit of existence and from that shore to throw a spear that will still travel away from the thrower, will still

have somewhere to go, every somewhere a candidate for the center in a totality that is necessarily endless if it is indeed an all, and if endless, then centerless, as much space in every direction from every point. Wow. And looking, he says, into a puddle seemingly shallow gives access to a depth, to an infinity as immense as the celestial one that the puddle is able to hold. Wow2 (superscript in the original message) and Wow2 (subscript in the original message).

So beginning with any of these points, taking any point as a nucleus, and increasing distance from it while maintaining that speck as the center, eventually, the periphery embraces totality. And that is the powers of ten, an Eames film I saw in Chicago, the stills from the film that I have as a flipbook, the book about the size of things in the universe that I have taught when I invented a literary theory that caused me to seek that which could give my new point credence. I have reinvented something ancient, it turns out. I participate in one of the inevitable patterns, am part of a chain of observing the limits and joys of the senses, the logic and marvels suggested by

consideration of scale. And I am comforted by Lucretius' love of what I consider lovable paradox, to be both bound and unbound, both finite and limitless. And I am comforted by Lucretius saying that recycling is the nature of things, not waste. There is no throwaway stuff (including ancient texts—how I need Lucretius!) for stuff breaks down into basic units that are then free to form something else, to be part of something else that can also be the center of everything, and by extension, exist in some form for as long as there is totality, as long as there is existence as both the container and the content.

This is how to live, and it has been the way to live at least since Lucretius. From the center where I (re)configure a way to make whatever forms are possible out of various components; from this center, I arrive at a totality that as it widens away from my ideas embraces Lucretius, his part larger for being wider—but my idea therefore a
candidate for potency, for being a distillation: a potent drop at a present end of the funnel. I cannot resist another Wow!



About Thylias Moss:
Thylias Moss is the author of eight previous volumes of poetry. Her Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler was a National Critics Book Circle Award finalist, and was named by the Village Voice as one of "Our Favorite Books of 1998." A 1996 Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation and a recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, Moss has received grants from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Kenan Charitable Trust. She is Professor of English and Art & Design at the University of Michigan.


Don't forget! If you enjoy our regular features and special events like this one, please join Thylias Moss in supporting Poetry Daily by making a tax-deductible contribution.

________________________________________________________________________________________


Here's another take on Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler:

Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler
by Thylias Moss
(Persea Books: 1998) Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler is Thylias Moss's sixth book, her first after grabbing one of the MacArthur genius grants. Her work has changed -- moved further out, encyclopedia-ized. She has memories of playing jacks sans hands, Thalidomide-esque, but all it is is nose-sucking, all it is is the end of the world. The Brothers Grimm, Zora Neale Hurston, Amy Clampitt, Stanley Crouch: this is a thin volume, but spectacularly dense, provocative (is her cheating poem about Lazurus “cheating” death? or her and her husband's affairs?). To read her Susan Smith / baptizing poem is to be horrified -- yet, as Moss posits, 'tis poetry's job. The long, more formal open-field works, particulately “Advice,” “Sour Milk,” and the title poem, all break new ground. I want the book! I want the movie! paperback

          Bob Holman

And here's an opportunity to view without leaving this page, flamingos and Irish step dancers in parallel movement in proximity:





(I'm relying on movement clips available on you tube though had flamingos and Irish steppers been filmed to show the parallels, similarities would be more intense courtesy the exaggeration that accompanies focus --even so, groundwork, the root of the link is here.)
________________________________________________________________________________________

It is possibility that I want, and it is possible for me to imagine as many possibilities as I'd like to

--each one a tine of a limited fork, each one also a negative tine, the space between prongs, of a limited fork. Yes, this fork in my hand --further limited for the interaction and collaboration with my hand to access, at best, part of something itself part of something;

the fork that my arm extends by holding it, part of the system of limited fork access; I grasp what grasps. Pasta winds around the prongs, white ropes. I remember my mother wringing white sheets into twists that become, I'm sure of this, the twists of a white turban, an albino hive from which I'd have to extract a very funny honey --I assume that I could not resist extracting that strange, so even more desirable honey, any more than I could resist this movement, this journey from the winding of pasta to rare honey, a destination
becoming inevitable for honey in this nutshell (there are others simultaneously) being cracked here. It happened with socks in The Monday Aardvark of Laundry, and the following video is honey extracted from the larger hive of a poem that, like the universe it is, admits to containing what it contains, some glorious spots, some in danger, threatened and threatening, stable and unstable, the range of real. The structure holds, however briefly, but these junctures happened; the pasta, turban, hive formed something my mind could hold and nurture --that structure ever holds for any amount of time on any scale in any location, though this happens every moment, the moment itself a structure held and holding, amazes and delights me --what does this study of interacting systemsalso reveal? A dependency on delight (perhaps why there is, as
Joel Brouwer puts it in his review, an "allergy to editing," which happens, which is inevitable, Joel, erosion, variables and forces that nudge stable systems toward instability, unstable systems towards instability. While this dies, this thrives. Multiple locations of simultaneous activity [not synchronized necessarily]. That is the footprint of a landscape of existence. A landscape to which I hope to be true (as I perceive that, perceptions updated as often as I become aware that updates are necessary, though probably not often enough). Here is a model of a landscape of existence worth trying: John Conways' Game of Life).




Some of the mappings of the Tarzan Holler, of the Tokyo Butter can be (forms of) brutal, won't avail themselves of a certain kind of denial, do not boost certain kinds of reputation above attempts to perceive better the irregularities and all, her own too, the ordered messiness of movement, of existence that seems to be going somewhere, a point of movement, a rejection of pointlessness, mindless wandering (the mind indeed! --please, if you have a mind to, refer to My Neurological Winter).






- Posted using BlogPress from my Limited Forked iPad

Location:Everywhere in the universe!

Slavery (more legacies of)

More Legacies of Slavery


Slavery was (is) so much like what has happened (is) happening with credit now --to credit and to citizens. Credit card companies own (most) of us. Every day, my inboxes fill with offers to provide me with credit scores, and/or additional cards. Switch! (I'm encouraged).

To speed up shopping, link a card to your account, tap and go! Meanwhile, those at the top are getting richer and richer, and those at the bottom seem to get poorer and poorer, resulting in a vanishing middle class. The gap between the top and the bottom is widening --I hope you like what you're born into, because moving out of one designation and entering another will be difficult (at best).

As I write this, I'm recalling when (some, not all) women got the right to vote --not as impressive to me, perhaps because of (some of) slavery's legacy: seemed just right for women, from that tradition, as women (from that tradition) had always worked --after all, slavery was an (economic) path to getting labor done --an economic path with racial barometers and barriers.

For enjoyment, I read When They Were Girls; the they included Clara Barton and, a personal favorite: Susan B. Anthony. Perhaps because of my father's pale coloring, that book was magical to me, anything that applied to him, I figured (still do) also applied to me, but I was wrong (still wrong) about that. I failed to understand that Susan might not be working on my behalf. She (in pictures I'd seen) and my father were a similar color --they looked the same.
I come from a household in which my mother and father always worked, so it was not strange to me to be left at home, alone, while adults worked --no matter the job, I was left to my own devices, usually reading and writing till my parents returned. I started writing at age six. The legal right for women to vote was granted in my mother's country (also mine) in 1920, via the nineteenth amendment to the US constitution. But as a woman of color, she had to wait longer to exercise that right. Slavery, in essence, was extended (even to now --in many ways). Post-reconstruction America, was not a hospitable place for the variety of citizens (still true, especially if animals are included --it's their planet, too) that lived here, then and that live here now.

Please read more about the USA's history of low tolerance for racial equality here: (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2957.html). Read more about some of the history of black exclusion from home ownership via exclusion from bank loans here: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_discrimination).

--such reading can help to change a mind (such as mine) about affirmative action (which has probably) helped me, and is probably still helping me: as I think about policies based on (or rooted in) medical discrimination, especially against those with physical and/or mental abnormalities and/or anomalies. While not at the bottom, I don't believe (except for perhaps in remembering --no more mental math team for me, I guess!)
I am not at the bottom, either. I can still both teach and write, but with more compassion for those excluded from these ranks. I am a better person (seems better to me) because of what I've survived, and the ways in which this survival is manifesting itself. (--would be better, perhaps, if not for the banks.)

I do feel enslaved to banks --and to credit card companies (who really own me). My car is mine, however, paid for in its entirety (but, being a 2004 Nissan, the car does require maintenance, that I must pay for --often with a credit card, so until that amount is paid off, I suppose I don't really own my car --and as balances get too low for the lien holders, I get offers to go into more debt, possibilities of reverse mortgages, etc. (now that the house is nearly paid for) and a general lack of empowerment for me who is not a corporate leader, who owns no valuable stock, and who is not invited to the meetings where decisions are made. I pass nothing on any sides of tables (but I do have to report injuries, --my prior medical conditions-- when asked by companies about to make some decisions I'll have to try to live with --oh my numbered days!)

There was a time after slavery ended when blacks still had no rights, still lived without any real ownership of their lives, couldn't make legal decisions that would be upheld wherever they went --even within the country, south to north, east to west, etc. (Still a problem for the bi/multiracial and the gays & lesbians in various parts of the world.) Religions have made acceptance more difficult, not easier. It seems logical, for instance, to construct a brown Jesus. Would He not be the color that people from that part of the world tend to be? Our recent enemies from Iran and Iraq? Brown --a dominant skin tone (darker than my own father). The most violent forms of aggression against minorities seem to have ended or seem to be ending. There will, likely as long as there are people, be pockets of violence filled with people who take out their fears and animosities on others. An end of aggression is not upon us, despite turning the other cheek. It seems likely that lynching was an outcome of an end of a terrible system that persisted in the new (not really that new) world longer than anywhere else --and now enslaves us all.

My maternal grandfather was murdered, perhaps lynched --this isn't talked about much; hardly ever mentioned. His absence has been felt; however. He is enigmatic; a person of imagination, not memory. And he is one of my antecedents. --I came here by way of shadow and absence-- Incredibly shadowy --as a lynched figure would have to be.

I am beholden to companies with lots of money, bank wads (--I know that Nene is rich, but I don't know Nene--), the ones really responsible for my having the stuff I consider mine (could be stolen at anytime --hope not, however). Some of it, I've had so long I no longer fear a corporation taking repossession of it (again: could be stolen at any rime, but then wouldn't be mine tom worry about theft might help get me off the grid where none of this would matter, including blogs and websites --where servers are maintained by others, including the corporation --what I consider my work depends on them).

The house (in need of repair), provided I can hold onto my job for (at least) another five years, will be ours (I've been married almost 40 years) --no more mortgage then! Some (all Jehovah's Witnesses) of my friends --one of whom would have made a superb French teacher, were not supposed to go to college because the world was supposed to end before their graduation --in the eighties. But the world is still here for now --I don't know for sure how long--who does; even those who claim to know have based this knowledge on human perception --which remains problematic.

For how much longer, no one can say with certainty (--this planet is as vulnerable as any other cosmic object); and right on Earth, we've got climate change and its effects (poor polar bears), those wayward asteroids and possibly a return of a comet that took out the dinosaurs (the Earth does indeed have some craters. Click on this link for a list, each item of which is also clickable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Earth). It shows, what I believe from what I was taught and what I've been exposed to (what I haven't been exposed to has not had an opportunity to influence me, but if LFT is correct, then such opportunities might have a chance to occur before what we believe is here --according to unreliable human perception-- is gone).

Of course, we are capable of annihilating ourselves (hydraulic fracturing may assist with a process of annihilation --but may not-- contribute to an ultimate demise that seems rather definite to me. I doubt that humanity will last forever (Limited Fork Theory is all about strategies of doubting; connections could be made in doubt as well as in affirmation). So far, lasting forever has not been a tendency of any terrestrial inhabitants --why would it/should it be different for humanity? For human beings? I don't think that we are special, no more so than anything else alive. Aren't we just parts of other species in a long chain of life? Chain is significant, I hope, calling to (some) minds those chain gangs --and a song by Sam Cooke, released on an album: Wonderful World --an album where the rights belong to (Cooke's first single for RCA):

The Corporation.

Clicking on this link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_Gang_(song)) will take you to more info about the song. There are, of course, other songs about chains, but the focus is on the song named.
Click on this link (http://gerryspence.wordpress.com/category/corporate-slavery/) to read more about how we are corporate slaves --slavery that is a part of, it seems, citizenry (in this democracy --built-in slavery, built-in like appliances also made by corporations. One of the flaws of democracy, that many of us think of a form of (political --to differentiate it, as much as possible, further from religious) salvation. Our money does say: in God we trust.

Sharecropping

Quite an insidious system. You never own your little agricultural plot; takes an incredibly long time to buy off your family. You're encouraged to plant, plow, harvest, but progress is difficult (at best) to measure. This link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping takes you to more about sharecropping as Wikipedia reports it (I like how Wikipedia is an aggregate, relying on the knowledge and accountability of users --I see no reason not to trust this user-based system of info dissemination --I've been taught to trust the Bible and encyclopedias --Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, but one that constantly accepts info as info become available; it self-corrects, and expands, grows as humanity grows, --is as trustworthy as humanity is-- Wikipedia bifurcates, is a bit of LFT in action). Cotton enters here (again): the touch and feel. The fabric of our lives. Please visit http://www.lex97.com and watch the T-shirt skeletons movie, on the website: lex97 and on YouTube: the forkergirl channel.

- Posted using BlogPress from my Limited Forked iPad

Location:Michigan

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).

Hungry!

I'm very hungry, so I should get something to eat -- but what?
Some snails? escargot in French.

How about some grits? Or some frog legs?

Maybe it's just info that I crave, some definitive info --don't know where to get that. however.


I'm a litte worried too --not about limited on my time; everyone and everything that exists so far has those, but I do wonder how long any go this will last before a new cycle of existence begins, perhaps to dominate. Will there ever be (in my time here) contact with nearby universes, a way to eat from other gardens acquiring tastes for what grows there easily and in sufficient quantity to help this planet's problems with sufficient foodstuff and clean water for all!

The End Times


(maybe --I hope not, however)

perhaps now is the time to allow this blogs to become the cookbook, in part, that it can be. Maybe some food experiments could be right. Maybe real (no offense intended) top-of-the-foodchain chefs will offer some suggestions (then again, I assume much, as I must --to be a good citizen of whatever I'm a good citizen of).

It will soon be time here for dinner, and I am not prepared --How nice it would be to eat and be done with that, for all of my remaining time alive, but hunger will return like a stray animal I took in, hoping it would return, but a bit sad that it did come back, and I lack the capacity to condemn the animal (that was once invited) to a certain death (though being part of life already condemns what is a part of what we think we know).

i don't really know what is means to be here, but I'm here anyway --and I've worked hard to remain connected to this world without my having to address at all why I was not taken permanently (yet), joining my father and the billions who have already left, many in pre-biblecal times so without any planned restoration of life, no everlasting anything --we may not even be right about time which is not universal --whose time should be held as model?

No answers, no answers

here (or on any of my plates)....

Please come over: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Dinner Game, Dinner for Schmucks, Dinner Rush, My Dinner with Andre, Dinner at Eight,

Happy Birthday to everyone.

Here I Am!

So good to sill be here despite problems in the world and a chance of cosmic treachery.

I am glad to still have a chance to contribute, perhaps also being a source of contributions of others, maybe even for that Thai baker –I think I’d make a decent serving of bread –maybe not the tastiest, maybe just right to bne serve with some bread from this Thai Bakery: