Quandary #326

As beauty resides in the beholder's eye, so logic belongs to whoever defines its terms.
Your reasons are not mine.
Hence the difficulty of persuading by "reasoned argument."
Logic is a game of mathematics. Follow its rules and there is no escape. The conclusion arises from the premise.
Ventilate the game with reality -- which includes such messy things as passion -- and all changes. Surprising information appears and certainty is shaken beyond its foundation.
Not to worry -- it is all argy-bargy in the end.
--ml

So Far As

Stars drew our eyes until we saw patterns palpable to all.

Stars so far as we could see until we learned to see farther.

Universes! They, too, took form and pattern, so far as we could see.

Now the cosmos awaits our puny wit to find plurality so far as we can see.

So near can we see, we split neutron from proton with a mighty flash and bang

To announce, We Master!, with lots of people killed and stuff blown up,

Then we looked again and, so near as we can see, there's finer yet to see.

Some claim, so near can they see, the scale changes yet again. Many times.

Look near or far the pattern repeats: A fractal universe with no ends.

The creation ever iterates; we part of it and it all of us.

The old man hums a tune into his brass spittoon

Cocks an eye at the old moon and allows a point or two for the metaphor.

But shakes his head at my hopes of passing. Too, too many missed chances,

too few noble deeds, so little simple honesty, so near and far as he has seen.

--ml

Last Night I Committed Poetry – I Think.

Like the vivid hue

Of a young man's blue shirt,

Another's death engulfs me.

And, as promised, diminishes me.

Yet, after ebb,

I return to myself

a little closer

--ml

"Tis the Season

--ml

"Talking about the Poor"

Erik Loomis  is right to question a speakers position: Pro? Con? In? Out? Pay Me? Bless me? or round about?

Brecht said: "First feed the face and then talk right and wrong!"

One's moral worth is best measured after dinner and the Doctor's bill is paid; Not as a ticket of admission to the hall.
--ml

Winter Solstice 2013

 

Mobile: Brother Heinrich

By DJS & ml  

The English composer John Rutter delighted to tell the legend of Heinrich Susso, a 14th-century Dominican Abbot, who is credited with notating In Dulce Jubilo. 

One night, as Heinrich finished trampling the monastery's grapes with the help of Sigismund, the donkey, on the way to Sigismund's stable, they saw angels dancing in the sky and heard their song. Heinrich attempted to notate the song for the choir to sing at Christmas. Sigismund helped him remember the tune at a crucial point in the bridge.

We first heard this on Jurgen Goth's Disc Drive in the '80's on CBC Stereo.  Seven or eight years ago DJS knit Brother Heinrich as one of her Sillies. Now the cast is complete, ml built a mobile to display them all.  Melissa hung the mobile.
--ml

Alas Alack a Day! Why Was I Not Invited to the Wake?

Digby posts a quote which, despite her usually persuasive prose, and without the least fault on her part, induces me to wander off her point to my own pointless weepy stuff for the English language:

Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern and a fan of Mr. Brown’s work, wrote in The Huffington Post that, “Project PM under Brown’s leadership began to slowly untangle the web of connections between the U.S. government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and infosecurity (sic) consultants.”

When did among die?

Between thee and me
but
Among thee and me and the old bailey.

Yet here is this putative academic, with a presumable pile higher and deeper, quoted in a fileting of the language worthy of Macheath.

This is not the first time I noticed this atrocity. The first half hundred that passed barely stirred my stupor. This year's wine being altogether thinner did make it grate more thoroughly of late. Until this -- if only to belie the death of blogs -- results.
Remember, please! Connect two only with between. Conjoin all and sundry more with among!
--ml

Forward Fulmanations

While assembling the recipes for Dum Luk's Ordinary I came across this file. It is a sketch to begin a book. But which one? The synapses issue a stale fart and inquire if any whiskey might help? I give my best rendition of a deer in the headlights in response.
This being more a writer's scrap book, or doodlewerk, I take the liberty of offering to quote myself:

Caveat 

Neither to inform nor instruct do I write. Rather I hope to share my mediocrities, triumphs, and the failures that made them both possible. This is a work of fiction. I have taken to heart the hoary mantra of Advice to Writers:Write only of what you know For years I fulminated against this as a homicide of fancy leading at best to mere journalism – and folk think me opinionated now! “Mere”, of course, meant journalism in theory, Kipling’s “who, what, where, when, why and how” purveyed by a neutral observer, not the ill-kempt, own horn sounding, condescending verbiage of modern infotainment (so little info and hardly more tainment, *sigh*). Life has beaten into me at last that what makes a writer valuable is his point of view – that is: the imagination through which the writer conceives this world. First, last and in-between a writer must study his own imagination. All that happens to him must be filtered, reduced, transmogrified in the lens and alembic of that organ. What emerges is mingled with dross. For a Shakespeare all is forgiven. The rest of us take our chances in a frequently harsh, and sometimes indulgent world, busy at telling its own story. Here you have not one, but a double-barreled blast of my current effusion. If you like it you obviously are a person of taste and discretion. If you cavil at the germ and quibble at the dross, no doubt you are a person of discernment. Please don’t tell me about the fault’s you find, I am already busy elsewhere. Instead write your own book stating your own truth. If that contradicts mine I promise I won’t bring it to your attention. If in the process you discover that picking a quarrel with me is not so important I will be pleased. You have been warned. Here goes.

"Double-barreled"? What was I thinking of?
... wanders off in a blue study
--ml

Path

The young man

– scapegrace--

Declined chivvying

into a proper place.

Choose to drift

from space to space

into an old age

saved from disgrace

by obscurity alone.

                          --ml

Happy Solstice!

--ml