Procedure is Everything

I asked God to forgive me my sins, and accordingly to admit me into heaven immediately rather than into the fires of purgatory for 100,000 years, as would be customary in the circumstances.  He declined, citing FRCP 12(b)(6) -- "failure to state a claim upon which relief may be granted."

 

Victory Gardens

The time has come for me to cherish my relative independence, because it has a time limit on it; I just don't know what it is.  I see it all around me in my peers.

The next and presumptively final stop will be a place where living is "assisted," and where the fruits of the victory gardens feature peas, carrots and mashed.

We, the inmates, don't call the place by its proper name.  Having seen how our world has shrunken in the transition, and how things we talk about now are real to us but have already melted into history for those who have come after, we refer to it sardonically as "The Walled-off Historia."  We speak of rabbit ears and curb feelers, book bags, newspaper routes, wax lips and ice cream push-ups.  But also politics, bitterly.

The chaplain comes to visit once a week, whether we need him or not.

 

Metaphorically Speaking

I have spent quite a bit of time in this space talking about metaphors.  I've talked about how ubiquitous they are, about the great visionary biologist Michael Levin, for example, saying that "all science is metaphor!"  What does he mean by this?  I surmise that he means that in science we create models for reality that inevitably do not truly match reality, first because they are oversimplifications, and also because our limited senses wall us off from more than what they show us is there.  Thus, we picture every atom as a mini-solar system when in reality, if we had a microscope that could see into things at that scale, an atom would look like nothing of the sort.

And I have also talked about the mystery of metaphor-making.  If I say "faster than a speeding bullet" to people of a certain age, they will instantly recall the image of the TV Superman doing his thing "like a bullet."  It's embedded in our culture.  But how is it that we understand a metaphor when the first person to say it says it -- something like "she was the apple of my eye" or "Hitler and Stalin were locked in an unholy embrace in 1940?"  How is a beloved like an apple after all?  Did Hitler and Stalin actually embrace in 1940?  Our linguistic and logical architecture must be inherently fluid for us to understand in such instances.  (And note that to characterize an "architecture" as "fluid" is itself metaphorical!  It never ends.)

Metaphors were of course among the sharpest tools in Shakespeare's toolbox.  All the world's a stage, after all, and that world is your oyster, kid, if you just shuck it up rather than ... (never mind).  But I continue to argue without much company that Will routinely is forgiven for many such expressions that land with a thud upon the modern ear, and may indeed have so landed even in his time, but we are forbidden to say it.  Blow, blow, thou winter wind.  Thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude.  Nor so chill as my Pomeranian after a hearty breakfast of Kibbles.

Shakespeare has his place, but there is no metaphor greater than the metaphor that is used to make fun of metaphors.  In this, the champion is not Monty Python or even the BBC's Philomena Cunk in conversation with an eminent scholar ("'I wandered lonely as a cloud.'  But clouds don't have legs!  How was Wordsworth allowed to get away with that stuff!?"). The champion is the late literary and cultural critic Clive James.  

In one of his memoirs, James recounts how he would spend his down-under summers as a teenager at the Ramsgate Baths, just southwest of Sydney.  The main object was to impress the girls with extravagant swimming and diving maneuvers, both for its own sake and to establish his place in a rather mindless local bloke hierarchy.  

There was one beautiful girl by the pool whom Clive would be the first to admit that he lusted after, but as it often is, the lust was purified by, filtered through, the kind of crush one can only experience at that precious and fleeting stage in life.  And one day, as he discreetly spied her from his towel, a single dark pubic hair found itself uncovered by her Spandex, "like the escaped mainspring of a pygmy timepiece."  

We can picture the pygmy examining the pocket watch he has taken from his victim before eating him; we can hear David Attenborough intoning this most creative image with solemn satisfaction.  Oxbridge, which set the gold standard for such things, nodded in approval.

 

Pointillism

I have been meaning for some time now to make a very important and precise point.  But I've forgotten what it is.  

Maybe a smear is more what is called for.  Like Silly Putty on the sidewalk, stepped on, on a hot summer day, by accident, distorting the Bazooka Joe image that I worked so hard to immortalize.