18 December 2023

 

Reading How to Be Perfect but I'm not there yet, wherever that might be, maybe doing dishes or cleaning the toilet or brushing a cat before he vomits up more hair balls. The real problem might be that it's easy to be perfect. You’re perfect insofar as you do what’s unnoticed; forget the power trips the Greek gods reveled in, or even water turning into wine (quite the sleight of hand, that one). Work on relative compassion, not the absolute. Try to make compassion your cousin, someone kind of like you, but not quite. Above all, don’t advertise your services via Compassion, Inc., the corporation that aims to fill in gaps that cruelty left behind. One philosopher (who dat?) claims cruelty is the worst vice, because it happens between people, not between us and some god of our imagining. Greed can be done on your own; it’s just you and your amazon app, your finger fake pushing a digital button. Lust, too, happens between parties of one. I suppose you can be cruel to yourself, but there’s nowhere to learn the skill without mingling. An abuser singles you out of the crowd, but in his absence the crowd becomes a wild congregation, holy rollers dancing in the presence of his absence. And oh the speaking in tongues!

It’s lucky you like irony, a family member tells me, after I say I’d throw a rock through the window, except my left arm hurts. That the rock is metaphorical and my arm is real doesn’t much matter, except to add absurdity onto irony, which might be a form of analogy protecting you from too much knowing. The girl who doesn’t get jokes is a pure soul, though sometimes the joke’s on her. Like what you need being put on your shoulder in ‘Hey, Jude.” Paul would have changed that line, but John, standing behind him, said it was the best line in the song. I know too much Beatles gossip, now that I clicked on the bait. The Fab Four pop up in my feed; it occurs to me that “feed” is the right term, the way that animals in German feed and human beings eat. What I remember is what I’ve been fed. Then again, I don't do the cooking in this house.

If your students don’t enjoy poems, ask them to draw. The plank that in reason broke or a needle in the eye might be good starters to this menu. Lay out your metaphors on the table and push them around as objects. The palm at the end of my mind takes up a hell of a lot of space, until I move it outside my sliding doors. Take a house and furnish it with literal comparisons; it’s part of what makes the world so strange. If a tangerine is the sun, then what is the sun to the tangerine? Pick either up to throw; only one will scald you, but that’s the one that’s rendered abstract by comparison.

I have a word counter, and it’s not even gendered. Siri’s not got this gig; she prefers to offer directions (that are not orders) and dial phones that have no dials. In Toulouse, we were stopped cold by a sundial in the park, or was that Brooklyn? It didn’t tell time, but shadowed it. When it’s cloudy, there is no time of day, just a piece of iron sticking out on a circle. Illness, suffering, old age and death are cured in that park. Once, while walking in Shanghai, I came upon a Dali clock, melting into the sidewalk outside a department store. How many melted clocks would it take to alter our histories? When power is out in Gaza, clocks stop, but they stop anyway, like the shocked clock in Hiroshima. We are its eternity, our children the eternity of Gaza (its children may already be dead). In the old photo, my son wears a teeshirt that reads FUTURE. I’m in it. May they be free of pain and suffering.