Saturday Story
Posted by ben on 13 Oct 2007 at 06:40 pm | Tagged as: books, poetry
In the Animal Shelter
Every time you see a beautiful woman, someone is tired of her, so the men say. And I know where they go, these women, with their tired beauty that someone doesn’t want — these women who must live like the high Sierra white pine, there since before the birth of Christ, fed somehow by the alpine wind.
They reach out to the animals, day after day smoothing fur inside the cage, saying, “How is Mama’s baby? Is Mama’s baby lonesome?”
The women leave at the end of the day, stopping to ask an attendant, “Will they go to good homes?” And come back in a day or so, stooping to examine a one-eyed cat, asking, as though they intend to adopt, “How would I introduce a new cat to my dog?”
But there is seldom an adoption; it matters that the women have someone to leave, leaving behind the lovesome creatures who would never leave them, had they once given them their hearts.
— Amy Hempel (from At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, you should buy )
Dogs and humans participate in some of the most efficient teams of predators.
Hexagram 12 is named 否 (pi3), “Obstruction”. Other variations include “standstill (stagnation)” and “the wife”. Its inner trigram is ☷ (坤 kun1) field = (地) earth, and its outer trigram is ☰ (乾 qian2) force = (天) heaven.
Heaven and earth are out of communion and all things are benumbed. What
is above has no relation to what is below, and on earth confusion and
disorder prevail. The dark power is within, the light power is without.
Weakness is within, harshness without. Within are the inferior, and
without are the superior. The way of inferior people is in ascent; the way of
superior people is one the decline. But the superior people do not allow
themselves to be turned from their principles. If the possibility of exerting
influence is closed to them, they nevertheless remain faithful to their
principles and withdraw into seclusion.
what the hell is going on——
go spurs!
My prostate aches…
I can observe my own body cut open, without suffering!… I see myself all the way down to my entrails; a new mirror stage. “I can see to the heart of my lover; his splendid design has nothing to do with sickly sentimentalities”- Darling, I love your spleen; I love your liver; I adore your pancreas, and the line of your femur excites me.
what the hell is going on——
You became an artist because you were not content.
We were dissatisfied with some aspect of the dominant configuration. One of the ways of changing the configuration is the making of art. Other ways are going to the streets; other ways are to do something else. But there are ways to change the dominant configuration by making art. That’s why you become an artist.
… anybody after 1875, the artist is attracted to one of the supplements of being an artist. A bohemian lifestyle comes with the territory. You’re entitled to it. When you’re a circus performer you’re entitled to it. …. A bohemian lifestyle is against the dominant lifestyle. Your existence makes some guy, who decided to do it their way and go to business school feel bad. Because you both end
up with more or less the same access in the society. Maybe not the same money. but the same access. And money is just a means of acquiring access.
We’re getting back to what we all were aspiring to when we were younger, when we looked at dialectical materialism. We’re all getting back to what we aspired to as a decent, justifiable life for every person on the planet.