Building in downtown London, August 2016. Sunday stroll surprise for eyes.
Photo by Warren Falcon. All rights reserved.
"...the ubiquity of "normality" given the intolerable conditions of existence..."
Thus the corrective reorientation/enantiodromia of the Absurd and Beckett's version in the West aka Godot aka humor and/or of or with or from or by despair - the laughter born from the in-between them state and perchance AWAKE but for moment in time.
A zen master asks, "Of time, who is counting?"
There's resolution in't (the question orients)
the run-on
trousers limp
the cobbled
street where
a spring
silvers
beneath
the
avenue smells
too of singed
hair
a humming
boy hums
pokes bits
of scalp on
the walk
his small
white thumbs
alone touch
the white
lattice kiosk
sells the
Stranger's
face again
**
"Have I ever mentioned that Michelangelo practically never took a bath in his life, by the way?
And even wore his boots to bed?
On my honor, it is a well known item in the history of art that Michelangelo was not somebody one would particularly wish to sit too close to. Which on second thought could very well change one's view as to why all of those Medici kept telling him don't bother to get up, as a matter of fact.
Although come to think of it even William Shakespeare himself was terribly tiny, which is something I did once mention.
I mean so long as one would appear to be getting into this sort of thing.
Well, and for that matter Galileo would never even ever shake another person's hand, once he had discovered germs.
....
I have just wrapped my head into a towel.
Having gone out for some greens, for a wet salad, this would be because of.
And in the meantime the more I have thought about it, the more sorry I have gotten about what I said.
I mean about Michelangelo, not about Herodotus.
Certainly I would have found it more than agreeable to shake Michelangelo’s hand, no matter how the pope or Louis Pasteur might have felt about this.
In fact I would have been excited just to see the hand that had taken away superfluous material in the way that Michelangelo had taken it away.
Actually, I would have been pleased to tell Michelangelo how fond I am of his sentence that I once underlined, too.
Perhaps I have not mentioned having once underlined a sentence by Michelangelo.
I once underlined a sentence by Michelangelo.
This was a sentence that Michelangelo once wrote in a letter, when he had lived almost seventy-five years.
You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.
On my honor, Michelangelo once wrote that.
As a matter of fact I am next to positive I would have liked Michelangelo."
- David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress
I conclude re: the above so far -
Germs induce (eventually) other terms of engagement.
***
After a long afternoon at the Tate Modern Gallery pondering Agnes Martin retrospective I took this photo of the spacious ground floor at least 3 floors high of an higher even office building in the heart of London. In trance all eyes and legs only I had managed to stagger/spin/spend time in the museum's Surrealist Art gallery before needed air and exit/walk/gawk my kingdom for a New York sidewalk pretzel or what my old methodist grandmother called, down south, a 'pertzul'. Whatever. I happened upon it, the building, its glass, the hanging shards' color, the immensities thereof or in. Agnes-ed I was a pointillist blur wobbling about a London Sunday, all the city mostly closed advantage of which was city was mostly to myself but not much in the way of eats, no pertzuls to be found, not even bangers and mash and the horrid mashed peas splattering most served up meals as if a pigeon had flown over and shat splat on the platter before the mutter could be served. Most offal.
Me, accidentally, there are none, accidents, or so it is proposed, or was even so everly long ago pre-Socratical, I happened upon Cathedral of Saint Paul (not my favorite saint but), ethereal (interesting 'ether real' which it ether is after all though the word conveys the opposite) music, live choral large, wafting lures me waffling still the quiet avenue then into a packed house, Gothical standing room only, incense and holy water abundantly around for sniffs and dips forefingers (Michelangelo) only allowed in (note says it is so)...an hungred I stood so sprinkled shoulder to shoulder wondering why there were guards all about uniformed alert which dampened my mystical bent much but the Palestrina then the Thomas Tallis then a far distant priest and altar boy (man, really) Cathedral's other end, raises Chalice to commit the wine into Blood, glad I stood though tired for the Rite, the hand chimes demark the transformation of wine into Host then elbowed politely my way out into too too much brightness though late afternoon and more meander remembering Dostoevsky's "Alyosha, I shall set off from here...loving with one's inside, with one's stomach..." and mine, stomach, successfully found fish n chips in a most deserted square near an open market (a farmer's but it was shuttered) near famed Brit poet's upstairs flat but ground floor door to upstairs John Betjeman, he decades dead, whom I had ne're read but knew the name and again chanced upon the night sky blue door because the pub with the fish and chips was below the dead man's flat. And no mustard in the place. The pub. Not the flat. Bet your man here, appropriate post-recall Saint Paul ethers and forefingers crucifixions and later apparitions ascents:
Aldershot Crematorium
Between the swimming-pool and cricket-ground
How straight the crematorium driveway lies!
And little puffs of smoke without a sound
Show what we loved dissolving in the skies,
Dear hands and feet and laughter-lighted face
And silk that hinted at the body's grace.
But no-one seems to know quite what to say
(Friends are so altered by the passing years):
"Well, anyhow, it's not so cold today"—
And thus we try to dissipate our fears.
'I am the Resurrection and the Life':
Strong, deep and painful, doubt inserts the knife.
