I know I shouldn’t fire to anger so fast,
not for your ugly serenity and frozen mind.
But I am just trying to break free.
I want to silence you, until I realize that’s exactly what you want
to do to us all.
So I will be as frozen as you.
Currently Reading: Excerpt
A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink, and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director’s heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. Straight from the horse’s mouth. It was a rare privilege. The D.H.C. for Central London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments.
“Just to give you a general idea,” he would explain to them. For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently - though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.
“To-morrow,” he would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality, “you’ll be settling down to serious work. You won’t have time for generalities. Meanwhile…”
Meanwhile, it was a privilege. Straight from the horse’s mouth into the notebook. The boys scribbled like mad.
Aldous Huxley, BRAVE NEW WORLD
MAURICE SENDAK, celebrated author of Where the Wild Things Are:
Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters - sometimes very hastily - but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.
Empty spaces at the table. Empty spaces on the table. How many of us today are staring at empty? I’ll square myself away with it and find a little consolation in the idea, bright with childhood innocence, that there’s more than one way to gorge yourself and there’s more than one kind of food.
Happy Thanksgiving.
photography by meppol
My kind of Christmas spirit
Incidentally, I was listening to the Z-Realm podcast the other day and I found some of their interpretations of the zombie phenomenon in pop culture to be quite interesting. Namely that historically, zombies entered pop culture as part of colonialism (Haiti and the fear of the former enslaved other). Initially, zombies were controlled by a villain sort of mastermind that would command them to do evil on his behalf. But then, as globalization and mass media became ubiquitous, zombies mutated into a mass of others that cannot be controlled and that is beyond reason or discourse. The only purpose of this mass of alienated others is to cause chaos and destruction. Come to think of it, not a bad metaphor of our xenophobic times.
On that note, zombies died and came back to ‘life’ - only it’s not actually life, because people associate that more with nurturing or good things or green things. What zombies have returned with is a perversion of life that some might say is more powerful than life (because of its indestructibility, or maybe because we’re back to the fear of the unknown and uncontrolled).
Things once thought to be stamped out can rise again. A lot of xenophobes are reactionaries for a reason, I would think.
verb • to praise ironically
‘Spiritless’ by Moisés Nieto. I’ve been charging so fast through so much tension lately that I’ve started acting strange. I realized this sometime during the desperation of last night while raving on scrap paper about nothing that made sense; I’m seeing for the first time how bitter and detached I am. I need to run and linger and laugh and ache and see things just as things instead of always as things in the way. I’m going crazy.
We pass it in the hall, this lovingly realized creation with its trunk made from construction paper and sleep deprivation and foreign language students with stepladders; its leaves of oak and maple cut from orange and yellow and red; its scribbled gratitudes, messy and almost endearing, tacked on like prayers fleetingly remembered.
What are we thankful for?
Family and friends, friends and family, family and friends - in different languages in different wording, over and over, we thank them on our colored leaves: our first choice, natural and unquestioned.
The gratitude spreads to the other classes. The leaves multiply.
But we forget the words that crawl from our mouths during the other hours of the day: the drama and the my-mom-is-stupid and the I-hate-my-dad and the this-dude-is-a-faggot-seriously. Danke, gracias, merci. Can I find my leaf in there? Do we have what we think we have?
If there are two sides to human relationships and if two people can feed into it, then two people can suffer in it - cycles, right? So many of us wrote the same thing on that tree. So many of us spew hatred in the halls, only to participate in our own pain when the time has come for actions that actually matter (at least more so than paper words on paper leaves on a paper tree, I’m inclined to argue, but I’ll abandon that thread in the spirit of the holiday)
Still, someone drew an owl in the hollow of that tree. He peeks from behind the sloppy-cut masses of unthinking thanks. He probably watches us and laughs: danke, gracias, merci.
(Photograph by Finvara)
you toddling mass of pedagogy,
pinky up and screaming,
you think you are an artist.
satire? comedy?
you do it well— (you deserve an insect)
you have one eye and a swollen heart,
you claim to share it with the world.
every deity loves you, you say—
but you defend their souls poorly.
preaching greatness,
but toppling elitism,
how the hypocrisy burns!
you want to shake our lives,
want to shake our heads,
but you shake our hands and
drag us down with you. (you’ll splat! before us)
you want to teach us,
yes… you want to teach us.
o how the hypocrisy burns.
cast down your ideals,
throw away your nasty grin,
surrender your damned arms,
set fire to your pens,
—please just leave us to grow.
A Premonition
you’ll never do it, of course.
we are your garden, we are your nursery,
we are your reflection: shiny, new.
do you see the cobweb cracks?
do you see the fingers clawing past the shattered glass?
no, you see your children;
we turn our faces like sunflowers to the sun.
you tend us with your nectar
and bugs will better feed.
we are the cracks in your mirror
where leeches ooze drunk on you.
gush to me your cursive curse,
grant to me your thinker’s crown,
give to me the vice to feel your vapid love.
give anything.
I will take it.
I’ll hate you, but
I will take it and laugh louder than you.
‘anything’ is a weapon;
anything is better than
your magnamity,
your misguided lantern’s teeth,
your high road to empty joy -
because you can’t feel our reaching fingers
you can’t hear us scream war and bleed thirst
you can’t see the bugs that wait to chew us up
and you will never know
even after your lantern has shined on the glittering wreckage
of the place that we left without needing you to show the way.
you will never know.
Being a wizard isn’t going to class every day, sitting at a desk every day, listening to the same teachers say the same things every day. It isn’t about uniforms. It isn’t about “institution” or cute exam acronyms.
Being a wizard is dragging yourself through days that are just as close to hell as the nightmares at night. It’s fighting friends you love about things you loathe. It’s making something out of nothing; it’s turning some things into nothing; it’s realizing that you are not everything.
It’s walking down the forbidden corridors and learning from it.
It’s putting up a struggle and figuring out exactly why you are putting up that struggle (this can take a while).
It’s about winning. Maybe. But not always.
It’s about being prepared for the “not always.”
Magic isn’t always sparkly. We’re all wizards in our own growing, nostalgic, twisted, forward-chasing ways.
