It's a cook book!
(Costing not less than everything.)
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| The rainman gave me two clues: (and I, jumped right in) 1) A conversation overheard: Walking down the street just before Christmas two people are discussing 'Inherent Vice' - the film! One says to the other, "No one thought anything by Pynchon could ever be made into a film ..."  2) Finite tilings: Extending the edges of polygons generates tilings in which some regions are bounded and some are not but where the number of regions is finite. Two lines which are not parallel cross only once. These models do not require fastening but ¾" clips are useful during construction, as is carpenter's white (beige) glue at the outer crossings if you want them to last when handled (although they tend to stay together if left clipped for a day or two until the weave sets firmly in).Coffee stir-sticks only serve well up to 7-gons. After that they must be spliced which makes the models less pleasing (to me at least), less ... appealing. The 9-gon/nonagon/enneagon may be of particular interest to Bahá'ís in light of the new temple nearing completion in Chile. Also interesting in containing three triangles - equilateral triangles in the case of a regular nonagon. |
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| Of course there must be a formula to get these numbers - but the squash is not equal to such a task anymore (if it ever was). The models can also be fun as frisbees - tossed at the wall they ... explode. Delightful! :-) These next few are examples of what I call flags, banners. What they are are variations on the minimum stable possibility - four struts - and worth remembering simply because they are limiting cases. I like 'em. I have one in the back window. My son, looking up from the lane, saw it there - and he likes it too.        3) "Fish-fingers and custard" (Amelia Pond): I could be wrong, there might've been three clues. The yam started six years ago - a volunteer sprout on the kitchen countertop as it was waiting to go into the soup. I bought a largeish rectangular pot to fit on the windowsill and stuck it in. It gets water from the aquarium and the odd flick of cigarette ash - and a few verses of 'Sisters of Mercy' once in a while (elas vão prendê-lo com amor que é gracioso e verde como um caule). At first it grew vine-wise: the topmost leader feeling around for something above it and when I put a stick there curling and climbing on up. Over the years it grew many times back and forth over the window but the climbing behaviour slowly reduced till in September a new leader began as a stationary clump. I thought this change meant impending death (truth be told) but as you can see it's still going.         There are many cycles we normally know - day, month, season, year, sometimes longer (june bug flights, cicadas' singing &c.), human generations: brothers & sisters, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, as well as age-groups in tribal cultures - and others we have stumbled upon scientifically - el niño/la niña, lunar (19 years) and solar (28 years), Milankovitch, glaciation, elemental geological cycles of carbon & phosphorous, ice ages and geological epochs. It's enough to imprint cyclic events into the central symmetry processing circuits, dominantly. There are Northrop Frye's modes. I can't remember if they repeat. Are there three or four? Or six? ... metonymic, hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic? (It has taken weeks of mental Aikido for these terms to float up out of the molasses murk.) Then ... Anne Tyng's historical spiral (which happens to be where this misbegotten string of thoughts actually began). Now, a spiral is somewhat but not strictly cyclic. More along the lines of comme ci, comme ça and que sera sera. Teilhard de Chardin's development from geology to the Noosphere isn't even a spiral - it's ... linear. Same goes for the entire myth-of-progress-and-human-perfectability shebang - straight line. Lines is one thing - first coming, second coming and eternity for the elect - but lines that end? Uh oh! Planets go approximately round and round, comets elliptically ... asteroids? Some of 'em end as shooting stars and some as craters don't they? Curved line with a full stop. Life has been evolving on the planet for four billion years or so (in a universe 13 billion years old - they say). The estimated planetary lifetime is twice that - about eight billion years (dependent upon a relatively local fusion reactor), but the planet itself goes on, or at least the matter in it does. Waddabout the Big Bang? Is it a BANG-whoosh-whoops-wheeze-BANG-whoosh-whoops-wheeze- sorta cosmic Model A kinda sorta thing? Or is it a k-k-k-crank-KAPOW and Riddley Walker's 1 Big 1, a single backfire? The natural macrocosm might be cyclic (even though folks like our Northrop will tell you that's just a metaphor, a fabrication, an artefact built for comfort not accuracy). A microcosm lifetime definitely isn't. It may have been a grave mistake to get so ... (what to call it?) 'involved' (?) in thinking about the environmental Armagedd-i-on catastrophe, even if it does mean extinction. Demonstrably better (by far) to indulge & pursue well-founded self-interest, cash for dental emergencies, megabucks even, blow-jobs at the ready, choice & flexibility ... mmmmmmm ... Easy to make a mistake. Easy to confuse & get things turned 'round backwards: vitiate (viciate) from latin 'vice': to render incomplete, imperfect, or faulty; to impair or spoil; to corrupt, deflower or violate; to render of no effect, invalidate either completely or in part (legal instrument or force); to render inconclusive or unsatisfactory (argument); to adulterate; to alter feloniously.For, say, vitalise and energise. If only:        If only it were limited to the NSA & CIA, or even America, or even ... North America, or the 'western' elites, or ... or, or. But it's the whole fricken' shebang, the whole shitteree.  I think this is not misogyny at all but (has become) misanthropy, a more general kind of (mixed) feeling having nothing at all to do with sex.   "The answer is that these imbecile words are euphemisms for manic-depressive highs and lows, and that anyone who struggles for sanity avoids both." I had this message from him years ago. You'd think I might've heard it by now eh? Mind you, he was talking about 'some contemporary situation' and while this environmental catastrophe is definitely a situation, and contemporary in a way, it is not necessarily a cycle and so perhaps ... different. UNFCCC UNFCUC UNFUCT UNFCOF! [Realizing that it may not be cyclic feels something like the first reading of A.S. Byatt's 'Ragnarok', mixed with the horror of watching a Twilight Zone episode 'How To Serve Man' in 1962 (when TV was still new) and she calls to him as he walks up the ramp into the spaceship, "It's a cook book!" It used to be received wisdom that adolescents (and then twenty- and then thirty-somethings) are immortal, an almost sentimental philosophy. Now death is officially become a professional event, put so far away that the notion of actual or 'real' mortality is (even as observed here a year ago) interpreted as obscenity. The tune emerges over several weeks, almost a month (believe it or not), at first just a rhythm - dah dah dum dum dah dah dum dum dah dah-dah-dah dah-dah-dah dah dum dum - which resolves with excruciating slowness into 'Christmas in Killarney'. At first I think it's to do with 'Brigadoon', download and watch the film, a week spent just in that. Brigadoon, 1954, with an already complete myth of New York City as poisonous & effectively defunct. Someone who actually knows anything, say, Noam Chomsky or Jakke Straw, might laugh and say "1954!? It was well before that you silly wanker!" I'm afraid the human world is ending. Easy enough to say, "Well, your world certainly is," and leave it at that. Maybe add, "Good riddance!" or better still ... shunning & silence with no comeback, and good of a certain kind to be had in schadenfreude (taking malicious pleasure in the misfortune of others). A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. I am increasingly overwhelmed by grief and particularly (I think, because) I am grieving alone. ] |
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