umul

So, I wrote this on the train from Granada, and I figured I’d better post it before I leave Europe. Though I’m not sure the UK really counts as Europe anyway. I’m totally out of practice writing. This is the only thing produced this trip, other than a plethora of memories, of course. But I should write more.

I heard the revolution would come as a war elephant, a wrinkled giant, ambling like an earthquake, shaking out fiery tears that light the way.

I heard the revolution would come as a kiss, as fingers passing each other up arms, holding what sight says is you own.

I heard the revolution would come as a whisper in the corn, as the metal scratch of turned dirt and flashes of new sunlight on grass blades.

Let it come as it will, and let it be beautiful; but let it come.

I’ve dressed in foolish robes and stood on mountaintops calling, but I heard only rustling in the leaves and my own echoes.

I’ve dressed as a soldier and waited at the depot, but of the train I saw only a rumor in the distance.

We are six seas of people, washed with a morphine sponge; a tear-tide of troubles traded to a pillow god. We are a march to mother, who absolves us from ourselves and carries each back to their shoebox bed: she shields us with the body of her tales. Where is the bird that can fly alone? Where is the crumbling edge of the nest?

Six seas of people, dusted with sixty thousand years of penitent patience, choking the air between us. What wind can clear away so much dust?

I’ve cried in the blue corner, waiting alone while shadows of snowflakes dance down the walls and crumble on the sidewalk. A thousand hands have brushed my back in passing,—and moved on: carried by a tide spun by the crab moon, who clicks his claws like castanets and dances in the desert dust between the oasis of each.

Well, if we are to be so far in the desert, then give me an army of camels, to speak with every pool and carry our burdens in a humped back. If we are to be a crab tide of thirst in a salt sea, then call the turtle who carried us here; and we’ll get on his back as he swims through starry waters to where it is whispered and called and spoken. Where the choked-up waters become a fountain playing in the sun, and the earth calls us to our second happiness.

I’m waiting to wake up and see what the swallows have made out of the old adobe, while we were weaving cobweb dusty dreams, and sealing our eyes with sleep. I am sure that it is beautiful, and full of all the colors borrowed away since we were the youngest children.

Let me find six tides together in that new adobe, and we’ll sing six shouts under a ceiling so high the stars come in at night. And when night finally finds us, let those stars shine brighter; as though the burden of another circle has become a fullness and a happiness.

So first off, this is rather rough; not only in the presentation, but also the ideas. A lot of this is wrong. Also, it is probably harsher than is necessary. But anyway…

I went to the British Museum in London: there is no other way to characterize it than as the scientific product of colonialism. Thousands of artifacts from N. Africa, the Middle East, and China Most, if not all, obtained during military campaigns by “embedded archaeologists,” to parody a phrase. This plunder served (and serves) a double purpose: on the home front to establish the scientific objecthood of the conquered, and on the conquered front to remove the artifacts from the context they help to constitute, to strip the culture of its material reinforcements, in other words, to replace the context of the conquered with a “blank” context. This is not exceptional, but is the usual scientific process of abstraction.

The most striking thing, perhaps, is the removal of statues and friezes from the Greek parthenon. Here is a series of objects designed specifically to be in situ, designed to form a part of a building positioned within a city, within a culture, etc. Instead, the objects are spread throughout several museums in Europe. Each is tagged, cataloged and put in its own niche in a way designed less to recall the original than to provide the least obstructed and most coherent view of the piece itself.

For contrast, in the museum itself we have examples of a different take on artifacts in the form of numerous half-destroyed pieces repurposed at some point in their journey to the museum. Temple blocks sawed in half for building materials, coins sliced for bullion, these have been treated by past cultures as living objects. This tends to strike the modern Westerner as some kind of heretical disregard for history, or the past, but given what I know of these cultures (Roman, Ancient Greek, and certain Semitic cultures in this case) that is extremely doubtful. These cultures tend towards a fascination with the past, but always as a repurposing. For example, philosophical works rarely read in Roman times as indicators into a past period, but usually as a source of insights into present life and philosophical endeavors. The Greeks imitated Egyptian sculpture, but only as a way into creating sculpture, not with any attempt at “authenticity” as a re-creation. What these societies neglected that tends to strike the Westerner as blasphemous is a respect for the sterilized scientific project.

We should know by now the propensity of the colonizer to consider themself neutral in all things, to construct themself as the empty signifier, a ground against which other significations gain meaning. This is strikingly similar to the concept of abstraction, as the process of removing context (”subjectivity”) from an event or object, and seeing it for what it is “in itself”, seeing its “essence”, seeing it “objectively”.

Just as the empty signifier is not actually empty, this context of abstraction, the context of no context, is not actually an absence of context. To exist is to exist in relation: for thought too. To understand what science is, is to understand the way the context of no context functions, its internal relationships and its relationships to other contexts. Thought—always—is translative, is creative, muscular; it changes its object into something that the object is not, but thought can possess. There is no escaping this recontextualizing aspect of thought; even something as simple as direct sight is translation from what is not though into a thought-object.

Note that the context of no context exists in relation to, but distinct from the more general Western culture. A typical Westerner will exist in a “scientific” and “nonscientific” mode simultaneously, code-switching between them as the development of thought and conversation requires. For example, a Christian may believe in god-given morals, yet when sick they might acquiesce to the scientific framework of medicine without really performing any real integration between the two frameworks. Historically speaking, this context of abstraction has to be created within the larger cultural context. The two contexts are linked, codependent, and each useful to the other, however they are simultaneously incompatible; together the context of abstraction and the larger social context exist as the singular cooperating dominant paradigm, but each exists in conflict with the other.

The context of no context is not simply the context of thought of course. It is a particularized, manufactured context. It erases the independence of the object in the name of erasing subjectivity. The object becomes ex situ, which is to say it is translated to the context of the observing-controlling subjectivity, and then the subject is said to be removed because of this translation. To be more specific, the object is translated into dependence, that which can be controlled very finely, and the subject is translated into control, that which acts but is not acted on. This relationship must be established so prophecy can work, which is now as always the criterion of truth.

But simultaneously, this relationship must be hidden, as prophecy also functions to naturalize control, to make it seem irresistible. Only by hiding its aspect of control and appropriation can thought leave behind its attachment to particular human beings who participate in it and become a feature of the external environment.

Of course, for all of these disingenuous aspects, there is obviously also a positive outcome. Thought cannot be a feature of the natural environment, but it can be interpersonal, expansive and inclusive. The context of no context is built to include—but to include whom? The community of gentlemen, the free property holders who make contracts by mutual agreement. These who are to be equal before the human law are also to be equal before the natural law: this is the underpinning agreement of objectivity. And just as equality before the law does not lead to equality in some “factual” sense—whatever that could be—just as equality before the law is the enforcement of inequality, so it is with equality before the natural law. The domination inherent in any knowledge system is reinforced by that system’s objective character. By allowing anyone who goes via the correct channels to participate, the mode of participation is controlled.

We can see this happening in the case of the British museum. By establishing ex situ (i.e. in situ of academia) as the preferred method for studying an object itself, by allowing free academic access to these objects at the museum, but not returning them to their place of origin (or readapting them to be live in a new situation), where they would acquire meaning apart from so-called scientific meaning—by all this, the meaning of the objects is fixed and controlled, the path of scholarship is established with participation “free” and worldwide, but the conclusions pre-established to support Western cultural dominance.

So I figure I ought to do this before I leave London, even though I’ve only got about 13 minutes left on my internet time. I mean, yeah, like this is how you’re supposed to use a blog, do the I’m-doing-this,-I’m-doing-that thing, but I don’t know; I suppose it’s much more hubristic to think that you’d want to read this drivel about why I’m uncomfortable about journal-style blogging. So on that note…

London is cool, but disappointingly like the states. I don’t know how things travel so fast, but there are even neo-mustaches here, a la hipsters. I have pictures, but no way to transfer them to this computer, so you’ll have to wait ’till later for that. Note that I am camera-retarded and most of what I took pictures of are phallic objects (don’t worry (or celebrate), just PG phallic objects…). More on that when I post them.

A set of Rothko’s chapel paintings are here; amazing. If anyone is vaguely thinking of going over here, they should do it in mid-september, when they are shipping ALL of the chapel paintings (from Houston and I forget where else) to display them all together. Wish I was there then.

I will also post later a blog I started about the British Museum, which is interesting on many, many levels, but that will have to wait for free internet so I can properly edit.

And yeah: the weather is exactly like portland, except apparently London gets little differentiation between summer and winter (i.e. rainy all year), but it has more sunny days per week during the winter. I’ll be glad to get to actual sun…

About to be logged off, so that’s it for now. More interesting stuff later, I promise.

Evan

I was looking through an older section of my notebook the other day. Ran across this aphorism:

In many ways, the entire history of philosophy is just a prolonged adolescence. The gap between “what shall I do?” and “this is what I do” is made absolute, dwelled on. The leap is never taken; instead, we enter into the gap, we descend into the canyon and find bizarre rock formations and streams that flow according to laws alien to the surface.

That’s to the point.

It is no accident that philosophy today rides on the back of social thought. It is in the realm of the social that action is precluded.

I just read a friend’s post about dumping pesticides aerially over the entire San Francisco Bay Area. Apparently, they have already been doing this for a year in Santa Cruz and Monterey. I lived there; apparently moved just before they started dumping. Did I know this was on the horizon?—no, I wasn’t notified. The narrative behind this is that there is a certain kind of moth that has the potential to devastate crops. Hasn’t yet, but has the potential. Here’s the point of my excursion to this subject, quoting the SF Chronicle:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture obtained an “emergency exemption from registration” from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that allows the agency to use the pesticide in aerial sprays over California cities. Because of that exemption, the spraying program isn’t subject to state approval, according to representatives of the state Department of Pesticide Regulation.

Now let’s look at this for a second: this is insane. You don’t dump masses of insecticides in populated areas. You don’t dump insecticides indiscriminately over an ecosystem. It’s not wrong or misconceived, it is insane. It is also exactly rational.

Our economic system is the most fragile that has ever existed. There is no room in it for thought of the future, for thought of the individual. It is a dynamo rotating at a speed for which the structure that supports it was never designed. Those who manage it must focus absolutely on its immediate fundamentals or it will bomb and crash. Those fundamentals require a constant proportional increase to our already excessive production levels (see http://umul.freeshell.org/writings/expansion.html). The economy cannot afford to take chances with anything that threatens those levels, and everything will be sacrificed to feed them. That includes moths of course, but also the elderly, children—and also our capacity to choose sanely. The USDA has precluded the choice of the residents involved because it is not a choice: as soon as capitalism is accepted as a necessity there is only one choice: spray the moths, accept collateral damage, accept the possibility of a future ecological catastrophe to defer the economic catastrophe that is around the corner.

There is nothing isolated about this story in the history of capitalism. Every move in the history of capitalism has been in order to transfer the capacity for decision from people to abstractions.

As the ownership of the means of production was divorced from the use of the means of production, the previous system of economic domination of one person over another was given a third term: ownership. One class owned the manufactures, one class worked in them; one class dominated things, one class was dominated by things. In no case was there direct domination of one will over another, rather domination was achieved by subduing the wills of both to an abstract third term—ownership, a term which claimed an absolute rationality, even if an arbitrary one.

Similarly for the birth of democracy. In the European feudal era, there was a constant interplay of wills between the monarchs of countries and their vassals, between each vassal and the clergy, between the clergy and its leadership, and between lords and the populace. The distinction during the late medieval period between “tyrant” and “king” speaks to this: regardless of the absence of a formal constitution, power was only seen as unlimited by a few, most of whom finally lost political power through the loss of authority that naturally comes with shirking responsibility. The democratic move was a move against the direct interplay of one power with another to the abstract absolute mediation of power by means of a constitution. We can see this in the earliest democratic move in 1650s England, where the nobles formalized (abstracted) the advisory power they previously held implicitly. A democracy is not rule by people, it is rule by abstraction. Democracy looks at the project of cooperation and coercion in society as the project of determining a set of laws which rule over every aspect of cooperation and coercion, as the process of precluding and determining choice through codification of choice.

Similarly for scientific thought. What began as a radical turn against doctrines and absolutes, what began by supposing that if we demand repeatability and observation as the basis of truth we can no longer be oppressed by a social structure of authority—has ended as a formalization of knowledge (Voltaire’s encyclopedia still alive). Because scientific equipment is only owned by a few, because the idea of empiricism precludes the need for interpretation, truth confronts us as an abstract reified thought, independent of any thinker. This is the long struggle during the 16^th-17^th centuries to develop a technology of written language which excludes the subject, which excludes voice, which could be written by anyone because it claims to be written by no one. This is New Criticism’s disdain for the author, but just as much structuralism’s subsumption of the text as a social artifact.

We have externalized and absolutized our assumptions and relationships and moved into rational slavery. And now we want to get out. We want to move forward, to throw out all the idiocies, for which we know—now—that we should know better. So we turn to philosophy, and ask it: We want to get out, but how should we do it?

But philosophy is no more the solution to adolescence than it is the solution to the problem of social action. The preclusion of the possibility for action has come about through a technique for transposing the site of privilege’s power away from the physical person of the privileged—but this transposition is solidified within the realm of philosophy itself, abstraction. In order to remain ossified, power must continue to demand the reality of the abstraction. Part of that maintenance is the occlusion of the reality of the nonabstracted, the occlusion of the nonphilosophical. Getting out will demand both the nonabstracted and nonphilosophical.

Every time we demand a systemic view of our course of action, we emphasize the reality of abstraction generally, and thus perpetuate the status quo. We emphasize the rift between thought and action, we emphasize that the rift is passed only when thought is actualized in the social, only when action proceeds along socially preconceived lines. What we need is organization and action that is based around community, desire; we need groups organized around mutual support, not an abstract idea of how mutual support will work; we need groups organized around change, not an abstract idea of how change is to be achieved.

This does not preclude the necessity for thought, however. Just as every human decision is influenced by thought, and just as more thought tends to provide a better influence, so it is with social action. The problem is the reification of this need, the need for abstracted codes before action takes place.

In all life, constant necessity for thought is called inability to make a decision—in social action as well. The prominence of ideology, the ossification of abstraction, cannot be solved in the realm of pure thought. In all other life, action has come before experience, before understanding. So too, social transformative action must come before we have the full wisdom of experience, which we will only have when the revolution is over.

Oh no! They’re all going to die!!
 
 
 

Not to be insensitive. But I’m getting an inordinate number of searches for “effects of global warming on penguins” and so forth. I mean, yeah, penguins—cool and all. But this is what people are worried about? I mean, we’re having massive unpredictable changes in temperature and the rise in energy “needed” for air conditioning therefore exacerbating the problem and changing weather patterns and typhoons and possibly mass extinction and food shortages and the possibility of a temperature backswing and a new global ice age and—yeah. But I guess people are like: “The ice caps are melting? Oh no! What are the penguins going to do?”

Well don’t sweat it (pun intended!), because we’ve developed a special kind of “refrigerated room” where we can create “ice”. “Ice”, as is well known, makes up the majority of a penguin diet. These little fellas love it. You see, we in America have the most advanced economy in the world. Our economy is so big, it eats other economies for breakfast. When the penguins run out of “natural ice”¹, we’re prepared to create “artificial ice”. “Artificial ice” has all the properties of “real ice”; it gives an equal amount of nutrition to those hungry penguins. Also, since the Iraq war is about to be over, we will have a whole team of helicopters at the ready, to deliver “ice” to those hungry penguins! Remember: there’s no warming like global warming! Global warming brings the beach to you! And so we see once again, there’s no problem technology can create…that technology can’t solve.

[1]Oh haha! Not the beer! Penguins, like Christians, do not drink.

I made this book for my niece Azalea, who is 2. Clearly, I have been thinking about Blake a lot, though apparently not enough to have his genius start affecting me.

You left

and now you’re hitchhiking up SR-284 with thumb hitched up the hip oh-so-smartly while a combine crushes behind you and the smell of wheat,

grassy,

nauseously sweet,

sweats off the unseasonably humid air, usually arid and you’re

happy

you left; so you repeat it: happy

you left—

and god how the sky is vast god how it comes down on you like the smooth purple skin of a plum—

so you’re hitchhiking and someone picks you up and it’s

unexpected

how the car wheels tangle with the wheat and crush the wheat and burn the wheat

nauseously sweet

and you roll up a hill—bam—back down the other side and well that was

unexpected—but that’s why you left right? it was too quiet

right?

and now you’re all layed out, flayed on your back in the warm night,

unseasonably humid,

and it drip drip drip drip

falls

on your face

and so you stick your thumb out again, thinking “oh

shit” and hitch a ride up the road to some “Banfield Motel” which smells a little but hell, it’s warm, a nice

warm, woolly

pit

and you crash out there on the twocent bed and twist your unexpectedly curly hair around a finger while waiting for the microwave to nuke some acid

coffee

two hundred years of cultivation have brought you sour milk in your cup, so you cap up your head

red

like He used to wear before you and “oh

shit” you think as some nasty glop falls out of the cream packet but you don’t throw it away, you watch the floating blue curd swim through your coffee

black, blacker than buried asphalt

so you throw it away and

there’ll be no sleep tonight so you wait it out while the neighbors are building a drill out of toilet paper rolls they stole from the bathroom and they start

drilling

but hey, you can take it ’cause this is why you’re

happy

you left; and the other neighbor—cling! cling!—seems to be sharpening some kind of flat-blade knife on the

concrete

wall, wound up and hell, you weren’t going to sleep anyway

and there’s no going back to Maude now, no going back to her lizard

tongue

which she used to stick out on sunny days to soak up the sun

and it’d all just be one big round hoop:

tongue, arms, legs, she used to circle and hold you, fold you up and put you in an envelope as if to mail you off somewhere sunny but what

did it matter? it was already sunny, but see, she’d hooped you in a barrel and Patty the cooper helped her ’cause he loved you too,

and they’d leave the lid off and both stare in under a big blue sky and they’d hand you a dipper covered with honey and you’d open your mouth and send out all your ants to lick it clean and all this is interrupted

because the neighbors have finished making their drill and now there’s a big

hole

in your wall and you wished you had coffee or something better to help you fall asleep and now

the neighbor shuffles and sticks his hands in his blue jeans while some little lingerie girl looks around the wall and “oh

sorry” he says and goes back to work—he seems to be some kind of carpenter—

but then he turns the light out and this hole reminds you of

something

it reminds you of Maude and how she warned you never to look over your shoulder and you told her you wouldn’t but

everybody does,

so you looked and there she was,

all different with little bloody hairs all over her body, wet and shining, while the lizard tongue kissed a python with a collar of black feathers sticking out between her fingers, raising one leg that the python curled around

so you turned away, needless

to say you were happy

you left

and now the other neighbor—ping! ping!—is testing the wall with a steel peg and a ball-peen hammer and you know him and you know he’s just itching

for a crack, and the bed creaks as you turn over, and you cover your head with a pillow

and there on the motel table a snapdragon clicks open and you see a miniature willow tree bending her arms and lithe torso in a hurricane, leafed fingers scraping the ground,

and the wind stops and the tree’s there shaking and shivering and water drops are falling onto a sheet of aluminum foil

and you don’t think of Maude and you

want to say “it’s ok,” and wrap the tree in an orange silk blanket, but it’s too

late; too late

it’s late, it must be almost dawn ’cause the neighbors have fallen asleep;

it’s the time for wrinkled bones and ravens,

and you’ve built up a long bead string of will-you? and as-you-wills and maybe you’re just stupid and old but you still hope to give it to someone someday

and this all reminds you of something you’ve forgotten, you’re not sure what but it has something to do with that leaky faucet light out the window over a sea of grey bread, and that’s it: you remember horses.

And Patty the cooper and Maude the wool weaver and days spent floating on a starlight pond while the sun went bobbing on the airwaves

and Amos, the dog, with long wooden-fence farms where rotten apples would bake in the sun—

and you run to the door and your hand gets stuck in it, and you turn the handle and it’s a vice and first you think “this

is stupid” and you call to your carpenter neighbor but he’s diddling an old hag,

and then it hurts, it twists and it hurts

you don’t know how to go back to the wooden-fence farm, you don’t know how to tell Maude you were wrong, you weren’t

happy

you left—and it isn’t a vice of anger and you know she’d take you back like an old mare that ran the gate, but you just don’t know how to

do it,

you’re not really sure how you got here in the first place, like some drugged martian with no phone

so you just think yourself into Amos the dog, limping after a squirrel with an injured paw,

and the kitchen timer dings and your neighbor moans and the sun rises

I’m going to have the old ideas all over again.

I’m going to hunt through African savannas for the lion of love

And reveal it in a new zoo.

I’m going to wave my hands through the air until I touch the secret thread of brotherhood,

Sewn meanderingly through our habits.

Listen, I’ve found it again:

I am a rider in the grass,

And the wind blows my long cloak back

And it is made of a thousand bodies

Of family, friends, lovers,

Woven.

Poets, painters, and you, reader;

For 20 seconds you’ll be my tide as I crest the wave,

Until tumbling under I’ll heave-ho and hoist you up in turn.

My ancestors laid too long, cooled too much to blast the furnace,

But I am living, a molten polydoppelgänger,

A voodoo doll made with a billion hairs

And I can feel you squirm in me when I trampoline onwards.

I love you because I am you.

All my little schematic struggles are repeated outward echoing.

Hephaestus works the furnace with brawny arms.

He chews lead and burns his eyes

He sings with the hammer, and cries

Each is given their own lead tear to carry.

And the copper on each face is acid-etched; I can read it plainly.

Reach out your fingers and touch me,

You’ll see me shudder like a blade of beach grass

And pale away before the wind

Of your slow breath,

Your warm breath;

We dance as fire nymphs lost in a general flame.

Nudibranchs helixing seaweed

My water eyes receive you like a ship.

Hands are rocks;

The stone titan laid on the ocean floor,

Hands break into sand

Swirling sandsnakes

Rippling current dunes

Kelp is anchored to the heart

A small brown fish lives in the soil.

For Justin Beard 1980-2007

Sipping on green-bottled 40s of Mickey’s under an old pine tree in the back of your house

An old tree that had come to this side through a veil of light mist.

Everything was so determinate in those days before the apocalypse,

Seven-years curses and nine-circled wisdom,

Months that branched from the trunk of a tree and sprouted leaves,

Not this interminable nowhere lava flow.

“Maybe we’re living in the infinity of our last thought”

—And a sip on the 40—

“Maybe we’re just lost stars trying to find a way to shoot out trails in the sky”

“Yeah, or maybe we’re trails of light shooting back into stars”

—And a sip—

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

My body is Pangea, floating in a black feary sea

And it is being torn apart.

We spent most of the night waiting for the moon,

The crescent moon was wholly yours, it was your sickle,

Your hand-scythe to harvest the foxtail,

To save it for a better age.

We sat in our cocoons of grass and set the green bottles against the sky,

Where the malt bubbles floated up underneath the milky way and mingled with the stars.

I told you the truth was coming out, it was leaking like pine sap, it was sticking to my fingers,

But you were a jester in love with the truth; to you it was the pine needles you brushed by, which touched you with a dew

That rolled off your skin.

Antarctica floated off long ago, as did Australia.

Slowly Europe, Africa, and Asia floated off and made me an unwilling New World.

Daily the earth breaks between Columbia and Panama, and brothers will float apart.

But little did I know you were to be ill-fated Atlantis,

Swallowed up into that hole of waters and wiped clean from our perpetual drift.

I miss you, but don’t come back yet, not here.

I don’t want to see you go through the whole progression again,

I don’t want to see you start as a moon-scythe reaper

Hoisting a bushel of foxtail,

And end up stiff-backed from carrying wood and gold.

I don’t want to see them make fun of you

Because you can’t pick up their illusions,

Because you don’t know how to weave dust into your eyes.

I love you, but go somewhere else, not here.

Tonight I’m traveling three hundred miles to find a foxtail field with an old pine tree in it,

And I’ll sit there on the ground

And tip my green bottle until the last drop spills.

Sunlight drifts; you think it doesn’t but it does.
Chamomile beach days under soft winter skies:
They drift to me now and again, ever since they’ve been unmoored.
Sometimes I wish I was a puddle on the sidewalk,
Where you walk everyday
I’d come up past the rim of your shoes
And touch your toes.
Just enough to tickle.
Just enough to say hi.

There’s a sun-star in your heart; I know ’cause I’ve seen it there.
I saw it when you were a rock mama, or a flowered-hair princess.
When you weighted your love on me, even when you lied.
I know it’s still there, burning bright.
Stoke the fires for me, let the Red Indian engine hum.
Let it carry you off to your everywhere.

Exactly like the wind didn’t blow before
On the flowered chamomile cliffs, under the eternal sun
Where afternoons weren’t interested in evenings
Thunder sounds big, and lightning’s bright
But that day I put my heart
Under the cupped shell of a chiton
Who held it forever.

All those moments in the eternal are brief
Like a sunflower sprouted in November.
But you gave me a little case of them,
And I’ll carry it.