From limen to lintel.

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[This is another story of failure really; having been unable even to find any context for Pierre Reverdy's aphorism. So then ... more unsafe thinking.] The OED admits a confusion: 'limen' directly from Latin = ‘threshold’; and 'lintel' (indirectly) from Latin 'limit' = 'boundary'. Every stimulus must reach a certain intensity before any appreciable sensation results. This point is known as the threshold or liminal intensity. And some of us are just impatient with every boundary, above and below. (See also 'Gravity's Rainbow'.) Might as well throw in 'lumen' = 'light' or 'opening' as long as we're in the neighbourhood, and 'lamina' = 'layer' but which might be stretched to 'crack'. "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." (Leonard Cohen) The thing about 'the secret' is that when you're young you don't need it and by the time you've got it it's no use to you. Euphony: some sounds feel better than others. 'Præcox' appeals to me particularly. Some common applications: dementia præcox (primarily schizophrenia); ejaculatio præcox, running on to: hymen (a digression - or is it?), virgo intacta, proprieties, & correctitude - a crowded nexus; senium præcox (aka Alzheimer's - 'i before e except after c', not). Senium is mostly just 'old', also feeble or frail but without pejorative - so consider how superior it is to describe the condition, Alz' just being someone's name. 'Early onset Alz'' then, is simply no match for 'senium præcox', doesn't even come close. See also: apricot, princock, precocious &c. That exquisite moment at the end of Terry Giliam's 'Brazil' when the torturers exhaust Sam Lowry/Jonathan Pryce's imagination and the diorama runs out. Compared with, say, blogging. Another euphonic one is 'perfidy', enmity, perfidious Albion ... la perfide Albion, das perfide Albion, la perfida Albione ... Long live Bobby Sands! Purposefully rebarbative you see (this blog that is), cunningly designed to give you every opportunity to opt out gentle reader. Little Jack Horner sat in a corner Eating Christmas pie. He stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum And said, "What a good boy am I." And then ... 'amity' (having taken the long way round to it). Two ideas: 1) Pierre Reverdy's aphorism, epigram, whatever: « Il n'y a pas d'amour, il n'y a que des preuves d'amour. » / 'There is no love, there are only proofs of love.' 2) Time viewed as 'human coin'. (Which came to me thanks to my erstwhile friend Georges Lemaitre.) Now, here's the exercise: Put'em together (if you're able to) and whadd'ya get? A metric for love! Not exclusive, not the only proof, but one that can be, at least approximately, measured. Another approach, quite independent, in Ivan Illich's take on the story of the Good Samaritan and his focus on the single word in Luke's version of it: saw (in the phrase "and when he saw him", Luke 10:33). Yet another in Wolfram von Eschenbach's 'Parzival': "What ails thee?" Time, interest, attention, care; all measurable in a way and to a degree. "Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried, As he landed his crew with care; Supporting each man on the top of the tide By a finger entwined in his hair. "Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew. Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true." Beware ...         the Ides of March;         the Ancient Mariner if you happen             to run into him;         Betty Johnson's 'Little Blue Man'             taken from either viewpoint; ... a-and ... oh yes ...         lonesome hearted lovers with             too personal a tale.

 
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Mother's Day.

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They're both mothers: So ... a montage then. ... "Couple it with something." What will it be? Not "a word and a blow," there's no violence here, or not that kind anyway. ... The photographers (also possibly mothers) play very close with their images so the available resolution does not permit determination of motherhood for the leopards & antelopes.

 
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Holocaust (concluded).

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It's just like Bob says, "I went to tell everybody but I could not get across." If this were, say, in the Germany of 1940 - sometime between Kristalnacht and Auschwitz - would it be any easier? But we already know the story of Kurt Gerstein trying to tell the Pope what was going on in those days; not only in quase-fictional accounts - Costa-Gavras' film 'Amen' and Rolf Hochhuth's play 'The Deputy' - but through credible historical records. What is happening now may be (numerically at least) orders of magnitude worse than the Holocaust, worse than Holodomor, worse than the Great Chinese Famine. Ah, but it's a probability not a certainty. We like to see our citizens insuring their lives on stacked & exaggerated odds and so enriching banks and insurance companies, but ... plan for a contingency like human extinction? How silly. It doesn't make economic sense. In the event there will be no economy and we are unable to imagine that. Arnaldo Angeli Filho: Urbe / City: A careful look will show that I have tried to impose an order on Angeli's images (with no idea of what he's really up to). Urbanization - flipping from 3/4 rural to 3/4 urban/suburban in the ~50 years following WWII - surely has a lot to do with the general mental stoppage. City people tend not to know how to actually do anything. Prejudice of course. The old-time evangelists calling out, "Repent! The end is near!" And the more recent millenarians & purveyors of the apocalypse - first-order nutbars by the gross. The (urban - universities don't grow on trees except possibly McGill which used to be centered on a Ginko) scientists and their (urban) adherents in the 'movement' mangle a 69-cent-word like 'mitigation' to mean reduction, abatement, cessation (ignoring its connection with palliation - the alleviation of the symptoms and incidents of disease without curing it), which then goes straight over the heads of their real audience. Surprise! Surprise! Nothing much happens. Don't shoot the piano player - but perhaps consider shooting the consultants if they won't retire. An often repeated notion is that we are conducting a life-or-death experiment of uncertain outcome with the only planet we happen to inhabit. All the while ignoring a successful experiment which actually took place - in Cuba, the Special Period when for a few years there was no oil. No mass deaths, and resilience sprang up like Topsy. QED. That this overcomes me, has overwhelmed me entirely, is evident; could be understandable, is not, whatever.

 
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How do you dig yourself into a hole this deep? and Worthy (continued).

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Open & Shut
["The carpet too is movin' under you, an' it's all over now baby blue." See below.]

Yesterday (according to Jim Hansen) the case of 'Alec L. et al. vs. Gina McCarthy et al.' took the U.S. government into the United States Court of Appeals in Washington DC for failure to deliver a plan defining how it would reduce emissions consistent with what science shows is necessary. Nothing I can find on-line today to let me know how it went. I will update this on Monday if anything turns up. [Ah! The public session has been called off (again, according to Jim Hansen). Hansen's epistle implies that the case is going forward but doesn't give any procedural details. I will try to find out what is happening and report in a later post. See also:         USCA Case #13-5192 Document #1490019 Filed: 04/25/2014,         USCA Case #13-5192 Document #1496137 Filed: 06/05/2014. The court has afforded the issues full consideration and has determined that they do not warrant a published opinion.] My neice died a few years ago, more than a few - seven or eight. I was away and could not get back for the funeral so I copied Northrop Frye's 'The Double Vision' by hand to create this presentation. No one acknowledged this expression of grief. Unacknowledged grief sometimes festers (apparently). It regularly happens that I post one of these silly rants having either forgotten what set it off or what it was I meant to say or both; what I meantersay as it were. In this case two of them: 'How do you dig yourself into a hole this deep?' about a month ago, and 'Worthy' after that. [Joe's 'meantersay' - when speaking to Pip - is not in the OED. An unrelated observation is that 'mean' (and possibly meaning itself) is linked by an obscure secondary definition to lament: "to mene one's moan," and onomatopœically (I suppose) to the Irish verb 'keen'.] Oh sure, I know this kind of meditation is ridiculous & strictly verboten! [I think maybe there's a clue in Dylan's 'Dignity' so I listen a few times ... but there's not. Although ... maybe remembering the distinction between such bogus transcendence as "God is Love" or "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know," or "The Truth shall set you Free" and some authentic kind of insight like "Dignity never been photographed," is a step in the right direction.] Anyway, sometimes later on I remember. Usually I don't do anything about it; but this time I will at least make (minimal) notes: I was standing in the first March sun waiting for a bus (to go downtown and try to find 'Spiegel Im Spiegel' sheet music for my grand-daughter), having a smoke, watching the people on the street - and there it was: "How do you dig yourself into a hole this deep?" I thought I would see about answering this question; perhaps it'd be of some use to someone some when. This is just a placemarker really. Whatever it was sparked 'Worthy' is gone somewhere between the tip of my tongue and lost in the mists - all very trite (of course it's not 'trite' exactly, more 'hackneyed' or ... some other word I can't remember). Not surprising really. As a medium of communication this HTML leaves a lot to be desired. So wrapped up trying to get all the '>'s and '<'s balanced (exactly) and in their proper places it's easy to lose sight of the alligators nevermind the swamp itself. (Not to even mention that it is so ... intuitive.   :-) Some of the sources of identity (where worth & worthiness originate) are in those events and situations, training wheels ... when (f'rexample) as a child someone sends you up to the corner store for a pack of "Black Cat Cork" and you manage it somehow, coming back with sweaty change in the other hand, nickles and pennies. Compared with being, say, of no use or ornament. "While one who sings with his tongue on fire gargles in the rat-race choir; bent out of shape from society's pliers; cares not to come up any higher but rather get you down in the hole that he's in."   (Bob, 'It's Alright Ma') "I got a hole where my stomach disappeared."   (Bob, 'On The Road Again') "There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes."   (John Prine, 'Sam Stone') "I'm falling through a hole in the flag."   (James Rado & Gerome Ragni & Galt MacDermot, Hair, 'Don't Put It Down') Not to mention Liza and Henry going round and round the bucket. This may also be where we can begin to distinguish the brutal ideology of positive thinking from genuine up-building. [Suddenly one of those internal manifestations of Tourette's leaps to the fore: "The only way to prove innocence is bloody inquisition." ¿Where on earth did that come from I wonder?] Jacques Doillon's film 'Raja' with Najat Benssallem: The first picture is the only non-screen-grab-from-the-movie I can find. Remarkable hands - I wonder if she plays piano? She has fallen off the radar since 2003 somehow. The NYT Review gets most of it right. Jacques Doillon himself with (his daughter) Lou touting another film: There is very little in the way of explicit sex in 'Raja'. Even the (seemingly obligatory) scene in which Raja & Fred have intercourse is mostly without body parts (a welcome relief). What there is is a sensibility that (as the NYT reviewer says), "... gets to the bottom and stirs up all the mucky dregs." Not 'all' certainly but some of them. The scene in which she beats him up ... well ... she's not a pushover is she eh? It has been a long and lonely six weeks since the possibility of a Harmœnic Convergænce caught my imagination. No action in Toronto that I could find. Maybe the way I went looking determined that - can't say. The snapshot-screen-grab from Credo was taken on April 15 - a full week before Earth Day. I held back - that's what hope does t'ya. I am wondering today if there is a symmetry operation, some kind of 'glide' transformation/inversion, that will help establish the connection between: 1) belief in an all-seeing all-doing deity; and, 2) complete inability to act in the face of possible extinction. Call it 'virtual denial' - so to encompass the widest possible selection, not only of those who explicitly refuse to act but the silent majority who know and sit on it. No way to dig out of the hole I am in and no way out of this awful city either. Getting difficult for this old hippie to find reasons to smile. Say wha'? The original banner read 'Mother Earth Day to May Day'. I took the time to edit 'mother' out of it. Where can you go with prejudice, however polite and well intentioned? Nowhere. But the involvement of Tim DeChristopher & Jill Stein gave it enough credibility for me to do what I did. Not much but ... what I did nonetheless. But they seemed to cut their losses early and gave it over to Timeka to run. No real wonder that she didn't - a lovely name for a lovely girl, coffee coloured skin, a coiffure worthy of Milli Vanilli ... They got some of it, the foundations, ABSOLUTELY RIGHT! y'unnerstan': Convergence, inclusion, one umbrella for all! Forró! And then didn't know how to pull it off! Why not? I can only guess ... but ... let's say: 1) didn't think enough about it; 2) didn't pull out ALL the stops on the organ; 3) polite correctitude (which I infer from the 'mother' earth); 4) failure (let's say inability) to involve k-k-k-Canada; 5) taking the low road and too frequently dunning for donations; ... 6) ... 7) ... I can only hope that in some room somewhere they are up to their fricken' arseholes in a post mortem 'lessons learned'. Oh sure, I am a great big asshole for saying this, a troll ... what ever.

 
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