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" ...in the middle of his life, he was becoming aware that there was no such thing as the middle. Either everything was the middle, in which case there was nothing on either side to make it, by definition, the middle, or everything was the beginning, or, of course, everything, and he did not like to think about this, was the end."

- from the novel, Burning Down the House, by Jane Mendelsohn.

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dreams, old one, March 18 16

I had a feeling, after watching The Wave, that it had effected me profoundly because of my nightmares, and watching it would effect my Rem Sleep monsters... again, last night I had a night mare, again no tsunami. Instead, the actor Robert Downey Jr. Ok.   Also, violence again. Not bombs, but semi automatic weaponry of various sorts. At one point, I woke up Ed Harris (now, apparently, ill be deluged by actors rather than waves) and exhorted him to Get the hell out of bed - we were under attack! That is, Rbt Downey Jr and I.  A few others milled about, no one A-list. I attempted to use a bathroom, but my privacy was obstructed by  a set of doors that had to be closed and folded in a complicated way like origami. (This signaled , in vain, that the nightmare and correspondingly the Rem sleep it arrived in was taking place in the early morning, and my bladder was trying to get the word to my conscience mind.) Gun play and assassins mercilessly interrupted my ablutions.. I had my machine gun with me. At one point, two elevators were the scene of familiar ambiguity, the reoccurring motif of being stuck between floors. One was an express to the "top"; this elevator never was available. The other elevator offered floors 1 thru 6; worse than bad, it offered being delivered to and left to yet another purgatory-like existence. Yet, I found myself riding it up and down with Rbt Downey Jr. He napped mostly during transit from place to the same place, and I held him like a baby. I loved him so- like a mother, like a lover, - it was a stricken feeling, as though his sleeping was a criticism, a rejection of me, which it was. I clung to him, knowing only his unconsciousness of my love allowed it. Of course I had gone to bed with indigestion.  Id only slept a couple of hrs the night before, and for a week I've held my head tenderly, estranged,  as though it was a crystal chalice brimming with poisoned punch, trying not to spill a drop of the corrosive substance. My eyes wander their Saharan circUmference, bedoin , parched, as oasis after oasis form a hopscotch of mirage across the vast desert landscape in which horizons are recalibrated, evaporating  upon arrival. I arrived at a hotel door, after a brief interlude of being separated from my adored, and knocked.   Rbt Downey Jr answered  surreptitiously, peering out from inner darkness, looking out at me with terror. Then he burst into tears. I quickly pushed past him and closed and locked the door behind me. I explained that I was there to help him, he needn't go thru this alone. He had barricaded himself within. There were machine guns propped as sentinels at different doors and windows (inside this hotel room, I found myself in a formidably large house,  equally dark and dim, with blackout shades on every window, and doors braced with various jungle gym piles of furniture. It was rather taxing to get around in there, particularly to find a bathroom, which was for most of this part of the dream, my only true destination. Of course, I took my gun with me, propping it within reAch of the toilet.. At various times the enemy without attempted egress, and bursts of gunfire broke the dusky dim whispering of the house.   .I found myself helping others (who had unaccountably appeared, and equally were unaccountably unskilled) who were inept; they seemed incapable of hitting a target at point blank range, so I took their guns, and shot the enemy in the head thru the door,  handed back the gun, and crouched to the floor , insuring that I saw the shadow of a fallen body before I attributed success and could return to my sysphean task of the bathroom doors. I made my way to the back of the house, and found Ed Harris in bed, under a  rancid pile of blankets.  He was asleep, so I roused him, shouting at him that he needed to rise and join us. I was angry, and pummeled him. He woke slowly, bemused by my frustration. I left him stretching and still langorous in the bed. I ran off to the bathroom again. With the origami doors. 

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Fleury-Joseph Crépin. No. 37. 1939.and Roy Ward Baker. Moon Zero Two. 1969.

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 Marcel Mariën. Mermaid’s Incest (L'inceste de la Sirène). 1974. and Kansuke Yamamoto, Buddhist Temple’s Bird Cage, 1940.

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Ravi Varma Press. Lord Vishnu. 1900s. and Ravi Varma. Goddess Lakshmi. 1914. and at site and Durga Puja. Kansaripara Art Studio, Calcutta. 1920s.

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Edwin D. Babbitt. The Health Guide: Aiming at a Higher Science of Life and the Life-Forces, Giving Nature’s Simple and Beautiful Laws of Cure, the Science of Magnetic Manipulation, Bathing, Electricity, Food, Sleep, Exercise, Marriage, and the Treatment for One Hundred Diseases: Thus, Constituting a Home Doctor Far Superior to Drugs. 1874.and Roman Cieślewicz. Ty i Ja (You and Me). 1960s.

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Swissair - Middle East Travel Poster, 1961 Artist Nikolaus Schwabe and  Japanese Travel Poster, 1950s

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Beth Hoeckel. and noetico-cosmo:Masaru Shichinohe.

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boscosotto: Quint Buchholz.and Source: stayfr-sh and Source: 500px.com

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boscosotto:   Laurent Dequick.

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bikes, kind of. perseidi:Wolfgang Lettl.and Dado (Miodrag Đurić) Soccer Players, 1955. and Remedios Varo. Homo Rodans. 1959. (2 and 3 at http://magictransistor.com/radio)

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Esao Andrews. The Stray. and Ilaria Del Monte.

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On Parting

  - by Cate Marvin                

Before I go let me thank the man who mugs you,

taking your last paycheck, thank the boss who steals

your tips, thank the women who may break you.

that remind you the eyes that were stars are now

holes. Let me thank the lake that drowns you, the sun

I thank the pens that run out on your midsentence,

the flame that singes your hair, the ticket you can't

use because it's torn. Let me thank the stars

that makes your face old. And thank the street your car

dies in. And thank the brother you find unconscious

with bloody arms, thank the needle that assists in

doing him in-so much a part of you. No thanks

 to the skin forgetting the hands it welcomed, your

hands refusing to recall what they happened upon.

How blessed is the body you move in-how gone.

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There Was a Time We Weren't Afraid of Saying That Is All

     Thomas Edison is credited with instigating the practice of saying Hello      when answering the telephone—and for the word's subsequent popularity      as a greeting. His inventor-rival Alexander Graham Bell preferred Ahoy      and answered the phone that way for the rest of his life.                                        —Ammon Shea, The Phone Book

i. Before the telephone, Hello was used to get someone's attention fast: Hello, what do you think you're doing? Cats weren't meant to fly, so put her down. Or to express a form of mild surprise: Hello, what have we here? A flying cat? Hello? Hello.

Despite Bell's stubborn preference for Ahoy, the world's first published phonebook said Hello would be a good idea when picking up to let the caller know you're on the line. It warned against improper language that should be reported posthaste to this office.

While people got acquainted with the notion of talking to someone they couldn't see, they tried out lines that didn't quite catch on like Are you really there? and Did I get you? But not so much Ahoy, which seemed too nautical a greeting to extend across dry land.

The phonebook recommended That is all when you'd said everything you had to say and God be with you might be overreaching, but He sneaked in and never left, disguised as something far less spiritually bracing— Goodbye. And someone's gone and done it now.

Police departments loved the ring of That is all—the perfect two-way-radio sign-off. Another day's pursuit would then begin and one more citizen, ready or not, could kiss his sorry, law-abiding (please report improper language) ass goodbye.

ii. And here's the part where I say That is all should be resuscitated in our time, a useful and straightforward declaration— there's nothing more to say or do. I'm done:

tonight a soldier's heartbeat has gone AWOL, one lover's walking out another's door, the gunman's gone as far as Ready, aim, the waitress quits mid-shift before she's fired, the stripper's down to nothing left to lose, the carnival's in town but it's not open, the Human Cannonball's not coming down, the factory worker turns off her machine, the baby finally quiets into dreaming, and in his breathless encore Sonny Rollins now blows away the crowd with one long note he won't call back into his horn until he's out of sight offstage—and even then he might decide this isn't over yet.

iii.

There's heavy lifting going on tonight and maybe, for a change, that won't be all for nothing. Let's say someone's load is lightened, that Porky Pig took elocution lessons: his That's all, folks! goes off without a hitch. And Keats' beauty-truth-truth-beauty bit sounds good, but is that really all we know on Earth? We need to know. And living out our days between Hello and That is all, we hope the next time in our Better-luck- next-time is headed our way fairly soon.

If what arrives is less than we expected, too small to change our lives all by itself, then how about providing us at least a place to catch our breath? That's pretty much what good poems—never mind a thing like this Hello-what-have-we-here affair of mine— on their best days are more than glad to offer. They make their stand in the thick of the world to reinvent what's possible again, and never once do they just phone it in.

Ahoy, hello, or do you read me? Over and out is so much easier to say than do. Than to be done with. Done for good. At times we'll say something's as good as done, but in real life it hardly ever is. We mean to say it actually will happen— and quickly too, if we have anything to say about it. Or to say at all.

I know I have a lot of say in these last lines, so please forgive me. I don't mean to waste my breath or yours when nothing is as good as done that isn't done already.

David  Clewell

Almost Nothing To Be Scared Of    University of Wisconsin Press

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Hard labor, to do this every day: this place is false fronts and faux everything - a tacky Hollywood stage, a ghost town that even ghosts unwillingly participate in,  visited only by anxious and wary fictions. I expect lonely cowboys, I expect lone wolves. But not even they appear.  Sunset smears on the dirty window pane. No one lives here - they couldn't, the doors open on empty lots, the curtailed windows are draped across the void of space . Nothing in the cupboards that don't hang on non-existent walls.  This is where the evicted squat, over a smokey flame.

Here, the sound of the hollow wind  sighs and turns, spinning around and round in the cul de sac.  And turns again.  Behind the  facades of peeling paint, the churlish faces of clowns with upside down smiles and a single tear drop like a crown jewel or a crystal bullet embedded in their cheek, behind the drawn curtains, nothing but  what the tired and tiresome imagination can provide,  more of what is false, more shadows.

Those who inhabit this place navigate by echolocation. This,  an empty lot of debris and weeds and tangled brush, the broken rejected and discarded bits, the run-off of stories that interest and enlist no one. The abandoned , the muffled and strangled , the smothered and struck down, all  that wandered and got lost and was left behind, fossil, sediment, stepped on and around and over, merely part of the journey, and not a destination. The boring part.

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....that's the trouble with stories— They need to come to a conclusion and to have a point, Whereas the point of growing old is that it doesn't have one: Someone sets out on an afternoon, following his predetermined Course as all around him summer darkens and the leaves turn sere, And finally arrives at home, and finds there's nothing there.

John  Koethe

The Swimmer    Farrar, Straus and Giroux