Daydreams on the Cane Plantation: White Zombie 1932

"when the hurly burly's done

and the battle is lost or won"

In reason, madness is plural--a vision of a future.

Beaumont Haversham, their unseen operand, and behind such, their dreams and plans multiplied like invasive weeds--a plan of his own--to be sprung at the right moment.  Would it be right to say, the nuptial idiot daydreamings, were intertwined?

Love birds, exodussed blindly towards Haiti, with the wire given to them, "there will be a wedding!"  Graceful swans translated towards that far kingdom--a man of independent means, with wooden cages waiting for two biochemically-distracted starry-eyed magpies.

A lot of staring, twas--and the candle-carving principle grinding his two hands together "wishing and hoping"--

-Dante would have written rings around it.

-Shakespeare, 150 gluts about those two nuts.

-Hitler, himself, would have struggled with it.

-Marx would have found the plan plainly "mean".

-Machiavelli would have drooled over the possibilities.

-Cervantes would have dispatched his best embroidered napkin.

-Tolkien would have tossed them into a volcano.

-Faulkner would have related to the very pride of it--yet desired its destruction.

how they were jitterbugging 

like clock cuckoos on the screen--

before the average folk who  

unceremoniously stared at the screen.

In disillusionment, was it--disenchantment as of such to find themselves doing things like standing in lines with cattle--making survey for the sake of finger fidgeting.  Would they even, to two-fingeredly upset the hat on a stranger, simply to put a conjunction in their monotone tale of gross uniformity.  Better people, our story contains. Calling themselves in a heat to knot their chords into one, they took them to the sea--those two lighthouses gluttoned on darkness. 

Forty dollars, a borrowed axe, and his favorite book: progress observed of one's own.

Would that you had become a foe of the people, and I would recognize thee, not in your accomplishments or character, but by simply examining your cage.

Thoreau was college educated.

Impressum:

-Owned and operated a school that quickly failed financially.

-Was Ralph Waldo Emerson's house servant.

-Spent a year living in the woods with only $40, a borrowed axe and his favorite book.

-Famously refused to pay his local poll tax.

This resume, one of the luminaries of American History:  would we distinguish these kinds of failings and the outward appearance of a lack of hustle?  A man pronounced of much empty time; all the while, he was contemplating.

I set about to me to end of certain here unspecificed perturbations and various ministrations--I reminded myself of things we care, that come to dominating our intention.  Further, that to follow a crowd was easily to welcome a common fate--not that there was wrong with that, but first premise:  The man on the beach arguing that the average pebble was as unique and worthwhile a creation as a pocket watch.  At which time, the prokopton happened by and asked who directed set him to such a peculiar inquiry and theorem.  The beachcomber replied that he had put himself there and to the query of creation--

the philosopher replied:  "Then you gainsay, are lead by a bad man."

One reminds himself that the critic is always at the mercy of his own heat--and in respect to such, we have a ambient heat from that fever of mind of his.

There is the saddle horn that keeps us on the horse, and the straps will control the beast; we are decide to which we hold--its runs discordant to following along pleasantly as a content, well-adjusted fish in upon a river.  Again, if we follow along with them, we may with certainty project a concurrent outcome.  This we must heed well, as of making an informed, circumspect choice.

Of my own:

-A three-part combination exercise.

-Inflicting my values on web surfers.

-Seeing to the the regular business of life.

-Preparation for "tax season".

-My ass.

Such is matters of life: 

one moment we are engorging delicious fried foods-

- we blink, dystopia.  As reasonable people,  we next protrude in argument-

-we glimpse our snarling in their eyes--

-and in our own words, we find we have became our grossest enemy. 

Publius and Brutus: the inspecting and righting of a teetering chair.

One had checks, but needed balances.

One had balances, but needed checks.

Many an hour they sat by the barbecue pit, eating boiled peanuts and having gentlemanly arguments about how they thought their leaders should do things: the way things should be.

They had the classical education: practiced in reading ancient Greek, modern French. George Sale “barbarian” translation of the Quran. Positively willing to whore themselves for a moment with a volume of Homer, Ovid, Virgil, Herodotus.

They could even address contemporaries, like “what Thomas Paine would do for mere pocket change”—but these shirtsleeve indignities only among themselves, not suitable for mainstream audiences.

Jeff Desayuno and Lloyd Bryn walked over from the Sip’n’Git, and they started on about not wanting to sit with a third person, much less a fourth person—which sparked a series of letters that even got into the local news print.

Old Publius, his chair had a teeter on it, and it unsettled him enough that he would splay his arms suddenly in a panic—as if the chair were to pitch him onto the hardpack.

Brutus laughed derisively, not as an enemy, but in that sort special adversarial respect among old friends, and he folded a piece of the newsprint, the local pamphlet, for Publius to shove under that one tell-tale needful chair leg.

And it worked like magic.

Celebration of a Friday.

She(Elysse Saunders) walked around in the partial gloom, the red, purple, the orange, temperature dropping, quietude being whispered by the night creatures—insectoid things rubbing their thighs together—stopping momentarily in abject wonder around Dos Llaves—it empty, the blacktop and concrete surround insulate like a pizza stone, transmitting as a battery the elapsed day’s warmth.

Was quiet, dusk and the descent of darkness upon the town—the insects were getting louder, but there was something more—melody inside gloom, carrying as if on the breeze—infantile condensation of singular hopes brushing together into one scatterbox—something of a bandstand, maybe, near the middle of town, down through the historical district, a point she thought moot at the late hour—and in ambience, smelling warm blacktop and a hint of melody, the mere jazz of it where she stood was sufficient to nourish her spirit, despite prior intention.

Where were they? -she thought to herself.

She walked a wide turnaround, pointing herself back towards her own house, listening to her sneakers on the blacktop—at once rigid in the soles, but also absorbing—she listened to that contradiction, and each soft thunk she heard, and something of muffled echo that accompanied each step.

Behind a white spray of reflection in what might have been a dining room on the other side of that window, an old woman—Miss Emma--regarded her, and realizing they were looking at each other, in that same notch of eternity, Miss Emma waved at her and there was the trace of a smile on her face. She lived in an ancient Colonial house that still had the overhang on the left side of the house that was originally made for sheltering buggies—horse drawn buggies, that is, in the 1800’s. The old Samson House, one of the Historic District properties along the way, sat facing the lot next to Dos Llaves, did the Colonial-styled Samson House, an anachronism that seemed to sit on the shoulders of the town, not insistent loudly, but maybe, like Miss Emma, staring into the conscience of the modern world, much the same as the modern world always wrestled to redefine the archaic.

The usual wanderers along the thoroughfare, that were not along the street that evening:

what was happening elsewhere

was they knew.

From the science teacher at the school, the mailman, the varsity football quarterback, the football team punter, the varsity wrestler ranked third in the whole state, another who’s uncle owned the Chevrolet dealership in the next nearest town, who were all, but ordinary men, and sundry others, ranged from the well-healed to the grotesque—with the mayor and the animal control officer each lurking somewhere in the safety and anonymity that comes with standing in a crowd—they had a common reason among them.

16-40 years of age, were they all, and Kevin, pretending at a mere 14 yrs and 7 months.

Of Kevin himself, he was perhaps too jealously proud to be called a king, and his real pride was kept hidden out of sight—for he knew a world that provoked him unendingly by thwarting most of the things he ever cared for: he was a child, student and product of many masters, as such and usually he put the “lick” sound in the word “conflict”, the same as a curious untame creature would taste of anything that interested it, in the hopes of service to the appetite.

And as there are milestones in life that approach, foretold through friends of friends, classroom calendars and other sundry forms of record, the shining truth had been uncovered and made plain—a cause, a reason by which so many man would pledge themselves and risk posterity, dignity and property.

The good word had filtered through them, a distillate varying in potency, purity—a smile’s evolution into a greedy leer; the truth of the matter had evolved: a 13-year-old, one of the new young men of the big school saw it innocently, at first, and watched as that piece of information became sort of an introduction into manhood, as good in the eyes of the particular tribe of man, in the heat of it, as breaking a maidenhead like one of the lead dogs of a pack.

It was a classroom calendar—I tell you.

He noticed the 14^th of the month had a pink heart on it—a Friday made important somehow, marked.

The addition was marked “Elysse S. 16^th Birthday”;

and as she walked home, those 16-40 year old men were gathered at the Country Club pro shop, to have a cigar and a shot of strong drink--

in celebration of the 16^th Birthday of Elysse S.

 

The unbroken line: a consideration of life being persistent, or life, or persistent, or a line, or unbroken, anyway.

The line appears, in places, broken or even deteriorating, emerging from and vanishing into invisibility, but, alas, that life line takes up again, perseveres, traverses obstacles without measure.  As Pythagoras or Epicurus or Socrates said, and as we sometimes need to be reminded during times of adversity, "life is persistent":  in other words, if not you and your family, then surely someone, somewhere.

The unbroken line might do Ted Talks and hour interviews with Oprah, but the broken line has the best story, and is the whom about which people care the most, alternatingly as both a squeaky wheel requiring excessive attentions and then as an encourager between fits of struggle, in which one derives a peculiar semblance of meaning—if only in the lens of a specific moment.

Paraphrasing Seneca, “I speak to you, not as an expert, but as one who is asea aboard the same vessel, with you.”  A dismal significance it is, communicated mercifully for any stranger with eyes to see or eyes to hear, in having investigated tunnels and bridges that have no destination—and then reporting back, not a lack of progress, but a warning not to tread the former path for any that would listen.

If the westerner were in quiet despair, and the easterner were at a constant froth at one thing or other, nothing whatsoever is proven or disproven of a higher purpose—save that God is possibly yet cheering us on, lest we, in a prism of error and mishandlings, prove our lack of merit in the hierarchy of the universe, and finally demonstrate plainly that we have no real point in existing, after all.

Seneca as much mistrusted himself and crowds—and through all of his imputing wisdom and his learnings, the real firstfruit of all his efforts was an insane emperor that proved to be his societal undoing, in confiscated belongings and banishment to the far reaches of the “civilized world”, the helenized world, that is.  Was he a skeptical Socratic, then?  Was he only clarifying questions, instead of pointing out answers?

His pier in the Stoa mumble-mouthed to himself in private writings in favor of a closing of books.  It was as if to put on his Todoist or Monday or Tasks app, “do not read a book today”, and he scheduled that to repeat everyday thereafter.

Aristotle had the same problem as Seneca, in the form of Alexander, with largely the same result.

(Was another in the Stoa later that undid that Gordian Knot by declaring that his leg could be fettered or tethered, but his soul remained at its liberty.  His earthly possessions could be seized for posterity, but that very what-not that made Epictetus the man he was, was out of reach of all.  “Trig as trig can be, you cannot, whatever you may devise, disturb me.”  It is similar to the Early Church days of Paul and Silas released from chains in divine intervention, then apologizing to their gobsmacked jailor.)

It was a failed New England schoolmaster that noted to his colleagues, it would be better if people divested themselves of learning and the time apportioned for study, in favor of merely learning a few simple chores, mopping, slopping, milking, dusting and stew-craft. His school went kaput, however seemingly never did his best intentions.

“Life is persistent.”

Something so odd in the universe as human life, bears out itself like a constellation in a profane formation that is too unabashedly pointless not to be a conspicuous reminder to any that see it that all is naught.  Or so it seems.  From consumption to ego-centrism to the various putting-upons we so freely dole to others—it is an unbroken, if not always clear, line.  And at the trailhead, we might see a familiar face, and further, they may have word of difficulties and encumbrances along some of those paths we had considered for ourselves.

I was looking over Archie Baum’s Tao translation, in which the word “Dao”/”Tao” is defined as “nature”, a double-ended instrument that one grasps somewhere near its middle, and pointedly, the unbroken line of mankind is at once both usurper and master, as man himself stands, in his own perspective equidistant between beginning and ending. 

The Tao Te Ching: Existential signposts and bookmarks.

Lao Tse unleashed a simple little book of such profundity that it causes much consternation in but a few lines in the Tao Te Ching - Dao De Jing. 

Simple verses of universal meaning.  

Deep concepts in plain language but a mere glimpse of the meaning of the universe, and how said universe maintains a stasis, a dynamic cataclysm of good and evil, water and aridity, density and levity.

-Could be read, not just once, but as a devotional, appreciated(even the antique version in arcane English).

-Accessed in in numerous English translations.

Illusory, but self-evident conundra.

Such as this: 

Silence being more instructive than words spoken or written.

The blunted instrument with the fine edge.

Indeed, Lao Tse only points towards the Tao, but hastens to explain that to express the Tao is an impossibility.

The Tao you read in detail is furthest from the true Tao; the Tao on Facebook, is the least of the real Tao.  The Tao in a book review or blog post is not the Tao, by Lao Tse's ontology.  Impossibility, conundrum, by the Lao Tse's own words.  Such as the Tao in the Mirror Glass: it can only point at vagueries, aspects of the Tao, perhaps even brush the nearby air, but never truly broach the surface--such as of the Sun or Moon or very molten core of the Earth.

All of which are pieces of Tao, but not the Tao itself. 

Checond Sances: Raul Begenaginn questions the universe.

If humanity were not longer befit

and you were granted a wish

to choose to be either a bird or a fish:

would you partake or relent?

Would you warm an egg in your nest?

Would you catch a worm in your lips?

Or would your past mistakes coincide?

Would you carry past woes into that first night?

Who condescends a second try

for one who so badly squanders life?

(if the mage gave a word

into a fish of bird

philandries of a life

respawn elsewise.)

The peculiar difficulty of discernment, as in a "failed life" or a particularly "happy life", is often of a species of hardening one's attentions towards those professing falsely, who could be, not helpful instructors, but inside, ravening wolves.