- Sure, easy. It wasn't the first thing you thought of?
- Blegsylvania fascinates me (you may have noticed), looking at the blegrells at 6:30 this morning, saw how many blegs had not updated since the announcement of the new pope. I admit, I too have no impression of the new pope beyond my lack of surprise he's against abortion and gay marriage and supports the continuance of celibacy and the all male clergy, but my point here is that, after ten years of doing this shit, I'm still counter-intuitively amazed that big news events quiet Blegsylvania rather than shake it like a hive.
- Progressive bleggal overlords discuss the A-List.
- Google Reader - the soon to be dead, Google insisted I acknowledge, Google Reader - was emptier than normal too this morning.
- Poll: over/under date Google kills Blooger. July 1, 2014 is my guess.
- Neoliberalism's theater of cruelty.
- Police state.
- Of course it is.
- The character assassination of Bradley Manning by NYT.
- The Re-Yodeling: John Podesta, Clinton henchman, calls on Obama to be open about drones, and you know what, eventually Obama will pass on whatever documentation necessary to end the kabuki over drones, the idea that POTUS can kill anyone anywhere for any reason at anytime by any means will be routinized though anesthetized by the salve that if it's by drone senior Democrats need tsk-tsk before approving.
- A preliminary sketch of a thesis on what it means to be Midwestern.
- Wittgenstein, for those of you who do.
- Walter Benjamin, for those of you who do.
- Borges' Aleph.
- The Third Hour of the Night.
- Scelsi's Hurqualia one, two, three, four.
- Fell asleep listening to Scelsi, woke up thinking of Scelsi.
NIGHTS ON PLANET EARTH
Campbell McGrath
Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally "night," like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian "Field of Rushes," the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the sky—and a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very air—is a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English).
—Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey
1
Gravel paths on hillsides amid moon-drawn vineyards,
click of pearls upon a polished nightstand
soft as rainwater, self-minded stars, oboe music
distant as the grinding of icebergs against the hull
of the self and the soul in the darkness
chanting to the ecstatic chance of existence.
Deep is the water and long is the moonlight
inscribing addresses in quicksilver ink,
building the staircase a lover forever pauses upon.
Deep is the darkness and long is the night,
solid the water and liquid the light. How strange
that they arrive at all, nights on planet earth.
2
Sometimes, not often but repeatedly, the past invades my dreams in the form of a familiar neighborhood I can no longer locate,
a warren of streets lined with dark cafés and unforgettable bars, a place where I can sing by heart every song on every jukebox,
a city that feels the way the skin of an octopus looks pulse-changing from color to color, laminar and fluid and electric,
a city of shadow-draped churches, of busses on dim avenues, or riverlights, or canyonlands, but always a city, and wonderful, and lost.
Sometimes it resembles Amsterdam, students from the ballet school like fanciful gazelles shooting pool in pink tights and soft, shapeless sweaters,
or Madrid at 4AM, arguing the 18th Brumaire with angry Marxists, or Manhattan when the snowfall crowns every trash-can king of its Bowery stoop,
or Chicago, or Dublin, or some ideal city of the imagination, as in a movie you can neither remember entirely nor completely forget,
barracuda-faced men drinking sake like yakuza in a Harukami novel, women sipping champagne or arrack, the rattle of beaded curtains in the back,
the necklaces of Christmas lights reflected in raindrops on windows, the taste of peanuts and their shells crushed to powder underfoot,
always real, always elusive, always a city, and wonderful, and lost. All night I wander alone, searching in vain for the irretrievable.
3
In the night I will drink from a cup of ashes and yellow paint.
In the night I will gossip with the clouds and grow strong.
In the night I will cross rooftops to watch the sea tremble in a dream.
In the night I will assemble my army of golden carpenter ants.
In the night I will walk the towpath among satellites and cosmic dust.
In the night I will cry to the roots of potted plants in empty offices.
In the night I will gather the feathers of pigeons in a honey jar.
In the night I will become an infant before your flag.
