Jul
27
Won’t be posting for 2 weeks…
Filed Under personal | 10 Comments
From Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Fact Sheet:
Symptoms usually start gradually, with frequent burning, tingling, or itching numbness in the palm of the hand and the fingers, especially the thumb and the index and middle fingers. Some carpal tunnel sufferers say their fingers feel useless and swollen, even though little or no swelling is apparent. The symptoms often first appear in one or both hands during the night, since many people sleep with flexed wrists. A person with carpal tunnel syndrome may wake up feeling the need to “shake out” the hand or wrist. As symptoms worsen, people might feel tingling during the day. Decreased grip strength may make it difficult to form a fist, grasp small objects, or perform other manual tasks. In chronic and/or untreated cases, the muscles at the base of the thumb may waste away. Some people are unable to tell between hot and cold by touch. [boldface mine, and yes, there are other sensations/pains]
In one way, this is a relief: This means that it is officially not my job to promote this blog anymore – if you care for the work done here, that’s entirely your job now.
I’ll check e-mail every day, and respond when I can. A reduced posting schedule will mark this blog from now on. And yes, I’m looking for a doctor now.
Jul
23
Turtle (from poetry 180)
Kay Ryan
Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
She can ill afford the chances she must take
In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
A packing-case places, and almost any slope
Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
She’s often stuck up to the axle on her way
To something edible. With everything optimal,
She skirts the ditch which would convert
Her shell into a serving dish. She lives
Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
Will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
The sport of truly chastened things.
Comment:
The contradiction is inherent within the turtle: it moves despite itself, and this poem goes through various sorts of motion. First, as a “four-oared helmet,” she must “row” across land, as if the land were as difficult to move across as water. Then from ships we move to horses dragged down by what they pull, I think (cf. Yeats, “The Fascination of What’s Difficult”); the most graceful animal can be graceless when burdened. “Axle” brings us away from animal motion, and recalls a carriage or locomotive. Still, an “axle” alone is not enough to “skirt” a ditch; maneuverability has been added to power, and finally, we are left with at least the thought of “wings.”
The “axle” – upon which rotation occurs – is the center of the poem, but had to be discovered despite the invocation of “a barely mobile hard roll.” It brings us to the poem anew: now we pay attention to geography. At first was the ocean, then mountains (“slope”). After that, a problem internal to moving (“stuck up to the axle”). If there is no problem, ditches are skirted, and while flight is mentioned, the turtle lives “below luck-level.” The geography implies a sort of rising and falling.
Still another rotation: “helmet,” “track,” “axle” – a chariot? That’s only half, because then there’s “serving dish,” “lottery,” “wings.” In the Phaedrus, wings carry the soul, and one has to wonder about the principle Socrates states is the soul: self-motion. Something similar is going on here: one half of the poem is active motion, the other half is about being carried to (“serving dish”) or away (“wings”). “Packing-case” and “pottery” divide the poem, as two ways to contain burden.
Again, the contradiction is inherent within the turtle: “Who would be a turtle who could help it?” We’re all turtles: the history of human progress started practically: we just wanted to eat. But it had to turn to optimality, despite our slow progress. We had to learn, ironically enough, to be patient with what we could achieve. The fact of the “ditch” pushed us firmly into living “below luck-level.” This creates another problem: progress, in a way, aims for what is lowest. It seems ambitious because of who we are, but take “us” out of the equation, and these are remarkably simple tasks to which we are asking for solutions most of the time.
The crisscrossing of pride and humility, the inherent faith in progress, and the constancy of burden (whether we “package” it in a simple case or shape pottery to a perceived need) all create a “hard roll.” Our political attitudes today take any one of these concepts and further simplify, i.e. transhumanism, where simple “progress” can make us immortal. The fact that this is believed – that the science is not only inconclusive as of yet, and it isn’t quite clear what will be discovered about our biology as time goes on – we don’t quite see. Perhaps we have confused how the practical and optimal relate, have forgotten how our better hopes are modest because they have already been chastened.
Jul
21
- quite a few of you are helping me promote on Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit and a few other places, and it’s working to dramatic effect right now. Traffic had found new lows this month: one of the days I was in Sacramento I got 61 hits total (think about how insulting that is as one nears 800 entries). If you’re interested in how traffic is looking now, just click “sitemeter” in the sidebar: my stats are publicly viewable.
Mainly because a lot of you promoted my content in various ways, traffic is looking a lot more normal and more importantly, this blog is looking like a community. You can’t imagine how thrilled I am about all the comments I’m getting recently, both on the site and on places like Twitter and Digg and Mixx and such.
My apologies that all I can offer are my thanks right now: I expect one day to be able to offer more, but if you had asked me 3 years ago when I saw this blog taking off, I would have not expected things to take anywhere near this long. Live and learn, I guess :)
Jul
21
Links, 7/21/09
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- Don’t touch ‘A Moveable Feast’ (h/t Josh) – one of my favorite books gets a defense for the form it is in. There’s a new edition out that is less than perfect, to put it mildly (this may require nytimes registration – use bugmenot to fix that).
- More from the nytimes (h/t aldaily.com) – Tom Wolfe talks about the politics of the moon landing: “a small step for Neil Armstrong, a giant leap for mankind and a real knee in the groin for NASA.”
- “Paying to Play in the Conservative Movement” – Redstate explains one of the darker aspects of DC very nicely.
- The Long War Journal documents some facts about US Predator strikes in Pakistan, which have been increasing by an enormous number recently – you know, things that haven’t exactly made us beloved over there.
Jul
20
A Thought on Stanley Kunitz’s “The Abduction”
Filed Under poetry | 5 Comments
The Abduction (from poets.org)
Stanley Kunitz
Some things I do not profess
to understand, perhaps
not wanting to, including
whatever it was they did
with you or you with them
that timeless summer day
when you stumbled out of the wood,
distracted, with your white blouse torn
and a bloodstain on your skirt.
“Do you believe?” you asked.
Between us, through the years,
we pieced enough together
to make the story real:
how you encountered on the path
a pack of sleek, grey hounds,
trailed by a dumbshow retinue
in leather shrouds; and how
you were led, through leafy ways,
into the presence of a royal stag,
flaming in his chestnut coat,
who kneeled on a swale of moss
before you; and how you were borne
aloft in triumph through the green,
stretched on his rack of budding horn,
till suddenly you found yourself alone
in a trampled clearing.
That was a long time ago,
almost another age, but even now,
when I hold you in my arms,
I wonder where you are.
Sometimes I wake to hear
the engines of the night thrumming
outside the east bay window
on the lawn spreading to the rose garden.
You lie beside me in elegant repose,
a hint of transport hovering on your lips,
indifferent to the harsh green flares
that swivel through the room,
searchlights controlled by unseen hands.
Out there is a childhood country,
bleached faces peering in
with coals for eyes.
Our lives are spinning out
from world to world;
the shapes of things
are shifting in the wind.
What do we know
beyond the rapture and the dread?
Comment:
There are many childless couples or people living in less-than-traditional arrangements who do fine – in fact, in many cases, better than fine. They’re accomplished, responsible, loving people who know their limits.
But we all know couples who don’t know their limit. Perhaps there is an example of such a couple in the poem above: “Some things I do not profess / to understand, perhaps / not wanting to.” We may be tempted to take that as a statement of piety, but “I do not profess” should strike us otherwise. We may think the link between fidelity and belief – is not fidelity believing in another? – also brings us to piety. But “we pieced enough together / to make the story real” should again serve as a warning, along with the import of the story in the first stanza. The girl initially thinks she’s being hunted, but in truth she’s the queen: the awareness of her sexuality results in her reveling in its sheer power, the exhilaration.
I suspect this is a couple that has invested sensuality alone with everything morality and wisdom usually stand for. In a sense, then, this couple is all of us – they’re just going through the logical extreme of making up a story to justify themselves. The second stanza – the story of what is alien – is most likely unknown to the internal audience: “I wonder where you are.” This logical extreme makes childlike imaginary worlds constitutive of adulthood, even as it keeps actual children at bay. The same mysterious power that makes sensuality so alluring suggests that all things change: infidelity is written all over the second stanza, and “belief” has been replaced by the dismissive “what do we know.”
I’m not sure what exactly to do with the details just yet. A few guesses: the “timeless summer day” suggests the woods are dark; “leather shrouds” and “chestnut coat” make me think that all there are in the woods are trees, save for the hounds. “Sleek” and “grey” indicates that aging does have a power; it pushes you where it will. As our “Beatrice” is human, she steps on leaves, not quite sure what they indicate exactly about aging (cf. Hopkins, “Spring and Fall”); the “trampled clearing” is then a false enlightenment, the perfect place for alien abductions and the like.
Our speaker in the second stanza sees “harsh green flares” that his espoused is “indifferent” to. Again, we’re in darkness, the light is not real, someone is feeling driven somewhere, and the implication is that we should know more than the rapture and the dread. After all, at the very least, one can make up a story together – no?