(Perhaps we, hidden as we were, looked to find our bearings: the direction of where behind the mountains behind the clouds was George’s sheepfold surrounded by tree branches, and George, so young, surrounded by a great circular loneliness. Would his hands remain as strong, as unquestioned during such a rain?) The last flies swirled around the rooms, as if drugged almost dead like tiny inkwells full of black ink that fell off the shelf of a childish disease; a passing troupe performed in the big café of the upper neighbourhood; the troupe also included two midgets. Children had great fun; they felt that they had suddenly grown; they could now look deep in the water well or to climb up to the attic and scare away the small geckos and cockroaches. Ribbons, tied on the hair of the girls, became alive, pinned the hair behind the ears of the girls, their necks leaving their faces clear, powerful like steel (those kids of another era, of the upper or the lower neighbourhood?)
August Your sign under the grapevine and the heatwave of August sweat under your armpits the body’s salt taste of the world as the thought of winter comes like a perennial thief to erase the heat off your forehead and off the wings of the sparrow that suddenly started chasing the cicada which quite unexpectedly performs strange mid-air configurations just to avoid the sparrow’s beak enough to manage to reproduce the new generation of cicadas and you took my hand, together to help the cicada in its task
– Ed wins again, someone hissed, he dies. – Ladies and gentlemen, O’Donnell began, reaching inside the oil can . . . Members crossed fingers and nibbled hangnails. They squeezed crosses, mouthed prayers, stroked lucky charms. – The winner of the Spring Festival draw this year is . . . My friend says it was so quiet inside Ed’s garage that night you could hear air escaping a radial. For the winner of the Dodge Car Club draw the experience was everything the previous attendees had said it would be. Five leggy beauties piled into the vehicle for the languorous cruise along the parade route. Miss Brake & Muffler was instantly besotted with the club’s appreciative representative. Later that same evening, the smoke from the barbecue pits dissipating, the last notes from the bandstand fading, the couple took a spin up Little Mountain. There, under a draping laurel vine, the beauty queen shared with the lucky draw winner the qualities that had earned her that esteemed title. Alas, it was the club’s final involvement with the festival. Ed’s garage, encouraged by the cumulative efforts of termites, flopped over on its side one gusty afternoon. Adulthood beckoning, the membership soon disbanded. Because he didn’t know what else to do, Ed applied to the military. Because its brass couldn’t convince anyone else to sign up, he was accepted. As for the Dodge, the central character in this story, it vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. I didn’t see much of O’Donnell afterwards. Sgt. McManus retired to a place not unlike the lake of his imaginings. On torpid summer afternoons, his rowboat drifting in the afternoon breeze, he often wondered about that car and the ruffians who deified it. McManus went on to an old folks’ home and then a grave without learning more. Years later a police museum was built at the rear of the station house. A call went out for exhibits. McManus’s widow was invited to submit items of interest. She donated her late husband’s many citations, his oft-used hickory stick and, because he always wrote everything down at the end of each shift, his logbooks. They hadn’t been opened in decades.
Albert Einstein may be the most recognizable of the great men associated with this level of scientific achievement. Every school child can quote the famed formula E=mc2 but many are not aware that the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Einstein for his work on photo electric effect. The Awards Council deemed his Theory of Relativity “too controversial.” To compound the matter, movies and the entertainment world of the day parodied this brand of science as comic caricatures and undoubtedly evil geniuses. Like Einstein, they often had halos of wild hair and spoke with foreign accents. Since those early days, quantum mechanics has infiltrated other scientific disciplines such as chemistry, electronics, and information science. Theories have been revised, quantified and reformulated, so unless you have a passion for the journey, it is difficult to keep up. Even the language tends to mislead us into thinking this is so vast as to be unimaginable. You might note how the public attitude towards quantum mechanics has been skewed. Take the phrase quantum leap; in common usage this refers to a very large jump between things. In fact, the actual meaning of quantum leap is a shift from the tiniest thing to the very next tiniest thing—in other words, it is the tiniest leap that is possible in reality. The absolute opposite of popular understanding. All quantum means is the specification of a quantity, whether it deals with energy or physical phenomena. Another anomaly that always makes me laugh is the idea that all this started with a Big Bang. What a strange name to give to the origin of our world. We conveniently forget that there can be no sound without atmosphere. Therefore, to be accurate, no atmosphere—no bang. Logically, it must have started with a ‘Big Nothing.’ The problem is that the so-called beginning wasn’t even the beginning, because gravity already existed. It is far less spectacular in these terms—an example of how words are corrupted in use. ~~ In 1922, the year following Einstein’s award, Niels Bohr received the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the structure of atoms. There was collegial disagreement between the two scientists…
Time for a Person in Love Time is different for a person in love; one’s not practical. moments come to an end with no results future is planned with the most beautiful images of yesterday’s love separation is regarded as death when the feeling dies one doesn’t recognize oneself. When we met at the grocery store we greeted each other then the dialogue started euphoria of the first encounter: if you had the chance to touch me I’d leave feeling light and with my eyes on the ground when the horrible glance of separation appears again. I let go of everything the moment from the present and I enter into a different foggy and indivisible moment.
Crossroads Crosshairs point to pointless a warning pointing to nothing you said, take your youthful wholeness and dart it at this flashing crossroad let your eyes stare deep in heart of destiny between cracks of leaden clouds and find solace in the chaos of the four directions with dreams yearning to become reality and fear of ambivalent commitment your glance is a mirror your gray hair reminds you of bygone days when you had choices crossroads and a warning sign to nothing. Look at today’s emptiness and dauntlessness walk without your vanishing idol let go of your thoughts and grasp the unknown as if it were familiar
Judgment The wind blows and uncovers all black emotions and thoughts. It undresses you to the skin. The strong wind blows down the mountains colorful dresses, pants whirl the sky sucks insatiably. It blows, and people fall dead naked and dead dead naked crows and black chicken attack them blood steams the empty landscape.
And I thought Natasha did a good job of telling us the history. For once she got away from ‘Lenin said this’ and ‘Lenin said that.’” “Yes, she was very informative,” said Carlos, a student from the Fine Arts department. “But have you ever seen so many ugly buildings? Even that Hotel Rossiya is no prize—a big box is all it is. The biggest I’ve ever seen. I’d rather see the Stalin-style of architecture even if the buildings do look like wedding cakes.” He stopped abruptly, as if surprised he had said so much. Maria began to describe a church in the Ukraine where her great-grandmother had been married, but she was constantly interrupted by Ted who kept pointing out other buildings along the way, each one more drab than the last. Jennifer allowed her mind to wander on the many windowless, anonymous buildings they were seeing throughout the city. What were they? No signs were posted; no occupants came or went. Carlos is right. Moscow is utilitarian and drab. I can’t wait to get to Leningrad. One 19th century visitor had described it as a city full of palaces. She expected much contrast between the two: Moscow and Leningrad—one with an ancient history of a fortress settled by peasants, the other built on the Gulf of Finland by Peter the Great as his magnificent window on the west. “Leningrad,” she murmured, for no particular reason, and then she recalled its older name: Sanct Peterburg. Saint Petersburg. Peter’s city.
…I evaluated the modern morals, shiny, glittering and sexy bodies and consumer goods that turn youngsters into numbers and consciousness into a desolate desert and I found them dark and horrible and spreading my glance over the horizon into the unknown future, I saw destruction and wars, hunger and ugliness, and I saw the bank accounts of the few getting richer and other people’s earnings becoming meagre and I said, The ineffable had other plans for people on this earth, while the ego and greediness of the selected has changed the planet’s route towards its destruction I evaluated the minds and hearts of the populace and thought of filling them with love, tolerance, pride, and respect for the neighbourhood thieves and for the ambitions of the enemy to balance the imbalance I saw everywhere
