Andrushka

I've got a question for ya'll: does the Bible support prescriptivist or descriptivist linguistics? Prescriptivism is the traditional way of thinking about a language. There is either right or wrong and right means conforming to a set of pretty arbitrary rules. It's these people who tell us to use whom in the objective cases rather than who or never to end a sentence on a preposition (as I just did). These people are also known by the technical terms jerk and snob. Descriptivists say that language rules should describe how people speak rather than tell people how to speak. So, when people say "I is here" or "He be working," they don't respond, "that's wrong," but look for how the rules that these constructions follow. They like to point out that the prescriptivists really are class-mongering descriptivists. Instead of accepting all language variations, prescriptivists just identify the language of those who hold power and describe it, using that system of symbols to keep the man down. Descriptivists can also be called post-moderists, hippies, and lilly-livered. So, with this brief background, what do you think about Biblical writers. It occurs to me that the Shibboleth incident was an archtypical proscriptivist moment. And what did Jesus really mean about nay and yea? And what about the jot and tittle stuff?

Posted by Scott at 11/30/2005 04:16:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

Thanksgiving is over. Fun was had by all, with the probable exception of the turkey. And the various plants that were sacrificed, assuming plants ever have fun. I doubt it. They seem a bit dour to me. We had the ritual meal chez moi then I went to Omaha for the weekend. Laundered. Churched. Zooed. Laundered. Anyway. Recently I've seen a couple films worth mentioning. The first was The Other Side of Heaven. It's based on the true story of a missionary who went to the Tongan Islands in the 1950s. It's absolutely wonderful IF you can forget he's Mormon (and don't get me started on that institutional insanity). When my Mom first watched it she thought he was Adventist because it deals with health message issues. The themes that attracted me were cross-cultural living and hybridity. Naturally, that invites a post colonial reading, but more important personally was the reminders of my own othered moments. Ukraine and Poland have very little in common with Tonga, and I'm thankful for the differences. For example, I was never truly starving. I always had ways of communicating with my friends and family at home. But still, there are plenty of commonalities of situation that made it hit home. I was drug through memories of Poland especially: the idiotic mistakes I made, the goodbyes I said. The naive idealism I came with. If you've been a student missionary and you watch it at a vulnerable moment, you might end up crying in the fetal position. Or not. Either way, you'll probably like it. The second was The Human Stain, another one of those fun-with-post-colonial-theory films. It deals with issues of age, race, and the general human condition in the US, both in the 50s and "today" using the lens of an ethnically-confused classics professor. There is also the requisite love story. If that isn't enough to convince you of its merits, it's got the Anthony Hopkins I enjoy--more Meet Joe Black than Silence of the Lambs. Anyway. Another week awaits. It will be tiring. I can't wait until the next break . . . assuming I get everything done that I need to.

Posted by Scott at 11/28/2005 12:12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

I'd imagine that most of us are familiar with the occaisional reference to Adventists in Gilmore Girls. It's always connected to Lane's incredibly strict family and her mother's choice of college for her. We've heard that Adventists don't dance, smoke, drink, or bowl. Well, most of us don't mind bowling anymore, but for the most part, they aren't too far off. They just tend to focus on one very small aspect of our culture. Well, today I was watching Hex (season two, episode 9) and heard a rather different view of Seventh-day Adventists. First, a bit about the show. It's one of those Buffy-wanna-be shows that takes a shades-of-grey approach to the war between good and evil. There's a demon posing as a priest, a witch that got pregnant by the devil with a messiah for demons (who now is six months old but supposedly looks 17), a 446 year old "annointed one" demon hunter who is supposed to look 17 years old, a frustrated lesbian ghost (the best character), and an assortment of characters who are "normal" to one degree or another. Normally, such shows are a bit off-putting to me, but the British accents make the angst of posh teens palatable. Plus, the theme tune is Garbage. That brings us somewhere close to the moment in question. Annointed goth chick is falling in love with Demon Messiah whom she is sworn to kill. Both sides are upset about this Romeo and Juliet twist and are punishing the lovers. The girl is smitten with boils by an angel (who is a bit creepy and has a French accent) and the boy has gone blind. While the angel pleads with the demon slayer to return to the righteous path, he says, "There is another in your heart. A good man. A better man." She thinks he's referring to God/Jesus/who knows and says "What are you, a Seventh-day Adventist?" Actually, the French angel was referring to her ex-boyfriend Leon, but that is beside the point. In Hex, Adventists are coded as touchy-feeling Jesus-loves-you Christians. That seems quite the opposite of Gilmore Girls. What makes the difference?

Posted by Scott at 11/21/2005 04:45:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

I loved the book, especially the first half. You can read three of the poems, including my favorite, "Writing in Water," elsewhere online. If you're curious about Rad, you can read a very short biography of him and praise for his book, but I suggest you read the poetry first because biographies and praise are sometimes unnecessary baggage to bring to a poem. Also from the poetry department of Scott's brain comes a somewhat L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-y poem: Red Barons Ant plants peonies, four to one odds on red. Sticky wet red and black war nectar, four reds on black, blacks on red flakes, petal falls to Sisyphus volcano. Sticky wet war dances. Black, red, Pebble volcanoes, heroin pollen. Snipped and encircled, snippet lovelies filling veins, opalescent blue vase second place to battlefields. Petals unraveled. Table cloth tapestry, table topped red, black. Chess swans float, drawn, drown, no longer holding blooms ruffled in ant dog fights, casualties in the glass distortion. Green scales pulled back; Trojan unfolded. Snoopy dances in the rain singing. Apple red from pulpy apple green, plain broad edges, chiffon war's all the rage. I stole the phrases "ant plants" and "snoopy dances" from somewhere and I can't remember whence. Fortunately, in poetry it's homage whereas in fiction writing it's plagiarism. The exceptional thing about this poem is that it's the only one I can remember ever getting back from Hilda without any significant recommendations and the highest attainable grade. This time I'm all out tooting my own horn. The thing is, I can never predict the grade's I'll get. Sometimes I'll do something I think is just wonderful and it fails to impress; other times it's like this, I write something out of deadline desperation, have little confidence in it and little time for revision and people love it. It's the same thing in my 19th century class. I write reaction papers that I think are excellent and they get a C; I dash something off at the last minute with little preparation, confidence, or inspiration and I get a perfect score. Perhaps procrastination really is an academic survival skill.

Posted by Scott at 11/17/2005 07:49:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

I am so flying by the seat of my pants this week. Monday it was a presentation over a book I didn't actually read. Today I was a bit more prepared, but not nearly as much as my classmates. In my 19th century studies class we began our group project presentations (group, in this case, means two people). Our teachers (there's a group of them) assigned us partners based on some arcane wisdom unknown to me, and the only two people in the class with y chromosomes were put together. David is a lieutenant in the US Army who plans to one day teach English at West Point. I'm a pacifist who rejects the validity of a large standing army as an institution. A match made in heaven. It eased things considerably that he was interested in my topic choice so we didn't have to go through another tired civil war presentation. My idea? The relationship between botany and imperialism, focusing on the invention of the Wardian case. We now call Wardian cases aquariums, terreriums, or vivariums (depending on what you keep in side, and if you keep a hamster in an aquarium, I recommend you get a vivarium before the poor animal drowns). It increased the survival rate of plants being transported aboard ship from 5% to 95%, allowing the British to send double-O-botanists into restricted areas of China and South America to steal plants and transport them back to the Kew Gardens in England. From there they were sent out to British colonies to create a sort of ecological mercantile system. So, Malaysian rubber and Indian tea wouldn't exist without the Wardian case. The spread of useful plants did help many people. Long before the Wardian case, New World species had already improved European diets, allowing for an incredible increase in population without a similar increase in medical technology. With the Wardian case, Cinchona trees could be taken from South America and spread throughout the tropical world so people could produce quinine locally. It's so nice to not have to depend on sickle cell anemia for survival. So, though I'm not a big fan of mercantilism or introduced species, I'm not going to argue against the effects of it. However, a little literary theory (post colonialism and Bourdeau) mixed in and one can argue a lot of things about the symbolism of the case, the ecological violence, the exoticism of house plants plants, the "democratization of colonialism in the motherland" . . . you get the point. Unfortunately, reading a theory-heavy paper doesn't make for the most engaging class time (a fact of which some people need to be reminded). So, after an introduction to 19th century botany and the cases, Dave and I decided to focus on discussion questions. The convenient thing about discussion-based pedagogy is that you don't have to prepare nearly as much material for presentation. While the other groups presented their research like a seminar paper, Dave and I hadn't done half the work they must have, well, maybe Dave had (who am I to say?). After the class, Dr. Winkle came up to me to talk more about the presentation and he was really excited about it. He loved it. He'd been more fascinated by it, apparently, than the "Myth of Acadia Constructed in Longfellow's Evangeline" or "Barbwire as a Refutation of the American Narrative." I'm not really trying to toot my own horn (well, maybe a little). The point is, I feel I did much less than anyone else and yet it was my idea and presentation that the professor was most taken with--someday all this positive affirmation of my slacking will catch up with me. I am setting myself up for failure. Which all brings me to a thesis I've long harped on: negative advisors. Clearly, many teachers are unable to sort out slackers from overachievers. So, in addition to the cheerleader-supportive-advisors universities assign students, we should have negative advisors who tell us we will be failures and no matter what we do is never enough to please them. Biographies of "great" people are replete with the archetypical narrative: Mr/Ms Successful was once told they would never make it and then they work even harder to prove that authority figure wrong. How can schools expect to produce future cults of personality if they fail to discourage students?

Posted by Scott at 11/16/2005 09:24:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

I just gave a presentation on a book I haven't actually read. And I nailed it. Go me. I wish I could say it was the first time I've successfully impressed teachers with bluffing, but it's not. On an unrelated note, yay blueberry smoothies.

Posted by Scott at 11/14/2005 10:08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

Last night was Terri Krovoza's half-century celebration. We had fun, I took pictures. You can view them here. I don't like using the flash, but indoors at night, I really should. Instead I used high ISO (many of these are at ISO800) which can give the pictures a fuzzy or blotchy appearance. One reason I like the new Fujis is that they do high ISOs better than any other; most stop at 400 and have horrible results, whereas this can produce decent prints at 800 and its ISO1600 quality is equivalent to other's 400. But, I digress. Some of the pictures are great, some aren't so much. Still, you might enjoy them, particularly if you were there or wanted to be. Also, you can download a .zip file containing three short clips from the nights activities at megaupload. It's 11 meg and the videos are in the divx format (if you can't play them, install ffdshow). Oh, and for all the Valentino's haters out there (you know who you are, Wendi), we had a Pizza taste test and of the competitors (Dominoes, Papa Johns, [Jabba the] Pizza Hut, Godfather's, and Valentino's), Val's came in first, followed by Godfather's. P.S. On the naming of the videos: I know the dance is the Hokie Pokey. I though "Hanky Panky" was funnier at the time. Perhaps not in retrospect.

Posted by Scott at 11/13/2005 02:28:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

In order to post on Wendi's Myspace blog, I had to register and make a profile. Part of that profile is location and Myspace allows you to search by place. So, you can type in a zip code and find the profiles of people within 5, 20, or 50 miles of you. I'll admit, I've done it. I've recognized a couple faces from UNL and Union (speaking of which, you can also search schools). There is a certain voyeuristic entertainment value to the whole thing. You can even filter the results, for example, by sexual preference. Blogger doesn't offer that. Why? Because it's raison d'être isn't to serve as a "meet market." I've never tried to develop a relationship with people online. I mean, if my life leads me to someone, that's one thing. If they have a similar and distinctive interest, I might think about it. But neither existance nor propinquity is enough for me to seek out a relationship with these people. That brings me up to the other day. When I logged in to post on Wendi's blog, I saw I had a message. I read the message. It was from some girl I'd never seen before. She lives in Omaha and had found me by doing a location search. She wants to "be friends." She has rather revealing pictures on her profile. I haven't responded. These online communities are fascinating, and particularly so since one of my classmates did a research share on online identity construction. Just check out whimit.com and tell me it's not a worthwhile site for composition research. But, my fascination is with the medium more than the people. When I view it as a site of research though, that invites a lot of ethical questions into the situation. Since I'm a firm believer in participant research, I really should interact. It just seems like a granfalloon to me though. Anyway, do you think I should reply to this chica, even if it's just to politely say I'm not that interested? Random randomocity: "I've always wanted to be in a band." "Really, what do you play?" "I play with minds. Go home and think about that. Oh, and don't look under your bed."

Posted by Scott at 11/10/2005 11:47:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

Now do it again. And again. I could do this all day. There are 31 different sidebar images picked at random. For some reason, random sometimes seems to favor one over the others. Anyway, it's way too much fun. Some of the pictures were taken by myself or Wendi, but many are lifted from other sources. All of them are of places I've been though. I think it fits with the wanderer theme. And for the Carhenge lovers, don't worry, you have a 1 in 10 chance of seeing Nebraska's greatest monument. And now I have to read about Onate's foot (that's not what I have to read, but I can't give everyone access to the paper by Doug Seefeldt) and write about contested memories of ballet for my 19th century class. And no, Onate doesn't have anything to do with ballet, it's just an example of contested memory theory. Have a wonderful day, and just for fun, reload again.

Posted by Scott at 11/09/2005 10:54:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

I love messing around with the template. What do you think of my new one? It's based off of this one, but with rather significant modifications. It's working fine for me on my computer (tested in Opera, Firefox, and Avant), but I'm interested in how it works on other people's monitors. Also, I'm considering whether to keep the side photo in color or colorize it so it's only shades on one color (such as a deep red or an orange). Any comments are helpful, including color scheme critiques. Update: I've been trying to randomize my side image. And I can't seem to. I've used three different methods but none seem to actually work. So, if anyone has actually gotten such things to work, I'd like to know how.

Posted by Scott at 11/08/2005 02:52:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

I'm obsessing on one form of artistic expression (visual) when I really am procrastinating about another (poetry). Hilda made this rule several weeks ago that we all need to submit a poem every week for workshop instead of every other week, which is getting a bit draining. At least it's not like the creative writing class at Union last year that I heard was a nightmare.

Posted by Scott at 11/06/2005 09:34:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

. . . but yesterday was pretty active, at least until seven when I fell asleep and didn't wake up until 1:30 am at which point I did a few things then went back to sleep. At Capital View Church yesterday (which Serhiy insisted on calling "CVC"), I saw a banner on which this was written: It was good company. Anyway, my November gallery has been updated with pictures from yesterday, both church and Pioneer's park with people from Carrington (the daughter grade's Serhiy's papers for Beth Rodacker-Borgans). And here's another church art. I was told by someone to draw a picture of him and I replied, "I'll draw Yu." Yu Huang Shandi, that is. Homophones are fun despite my penchant for making mistakes when I comment on blogs. The lines don't look so bad at a smaller size, but I scanned it at 3157X4746 to edit and I can see every pen stroke at that size. Curiously, getting up close to see paintstrokes is my favorite part of going to an art gallery.

Posted by Scott at 11/06/2005 04:15:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

Take a gander at my new gallery. I wish you could see the RAW format versions of the pictures, they look much better than the JPGs, but unfortunately, they are around 10 meg each and not viewable through a web browser. So, we'll have to settle for lossy compression schemes. The gallery begins with Thursday night. Between class, the poetry reading, and making copies for my presentation, I was on or around campus from 12:30 til 9:30. And I'd brought my camera. Naturally I was busy, so it wasn't like I was shooting all day, but I did come up with a couple good ones. One is of a fall tree at night that looks beautifully orange, much more beautiful than during the daytime. Why? Because of the neon glow of the Nebraska Bookstore sign. The only problem is that I seem to get Parkinson's disease whenever there's a camera in my hands. Later I was fascinated by the public discourse written on the bathroom stall in the library. Someday, when I'm more adventurous, perhaps I'll compare men's and women's bathroom graffiti. To tell you the truth, one of the things written on the stall door may have been added by myself (one could say the damage had already been done). You can guess which comment. The final photos of the night were of the exterior of Love Library, my on-campus haunt. That brings us to Friday. Serhiy and I went to our friendly neighborhood College of Hair Design for to get new 'dos. Now, this is something his Mom has been begging him to do for a while. I don't think he got it cut as short as she'd like, but it is shorter. When he asked how it looks, I answered that he looks like a woman. I brought along a camera and got some pictures of the foliage (because I want to be like Ceri and Ellen) and also of the haircutting process. Afterwards, we went to Bison Witches for their a half-sandwich and soup each. Their veggie sandwich is so good I hypothesize it includes crack (thank you, Pauline for the expression). Anyway, there is a smashing sequence of me attacking the remains of my bread bowl. I think the violence of it makes me look manly. One last thing before I bid you "ado." I've been trying to convert my church art, aka doodles done to keep myself attentive, to a digital medium. So, I scanned some with rather mixed results. A line that looks acceptable on paper is rather crooked and unfulfilling when blown up on the screen. Maybe my Parkinson's isn't only camera activated. I've tried various methods to deal with the noise and such, but short of retracing everything in Photoshop, I'm not sure how to make them look decent for digital exhibition. Anyway, here's one that I've touched up a bit (but not excessively and without spending too much time on it). If anyone has a quick fix recommendation, please tell me.

Posted by Scott at 11/05/2005 02:05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

No one has asked me about my celebrity crushes, but I'm volunteering one: Helen Thomas. Wow. But that's not what I wanted to post about. Tonight I went to a reading by Rynn Williams, the 2004 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry winner. She's also a life-long New Yorker and a professor at NYU. She had come to our class to answer questions earlier in the day so we got to know a bit about her before the reading. Anyway, I recommend Adonis Garage. Williams deals with issues like divorce, HIV/AIDS, city life, and desire in general. The praise on the back comes from people like Judith Ortiz Cofer and Jonathan Holden, and their recommendations are worth much more than mine. Williams doesn't employ the feel-good Kooser lift, but she's worth reading. Here's a series she wrote that I thought was particularly masterful. Positive 1. READING THE RESULTS I don't move, but the inside corner of my right eye turns glassy, then shatters, hands focus more sharply. I don't move, but the pigeon shudders on the sill. The door opens to a maze of wallpaper, family photos-- their bliss-frieze burns the last unaffected corner of my sight, like molten Karo. My husband's mouth collapses, and the air about his shoulders has crystallized. We don't say a word, all the noise is around us, the letter, half-folded, on the desk, an abatross, a dove. 2. POSITIVE Because in those days there were no words for such things I took handfuls of vitamins and slept with a trumpet flower under my pillow, I ate at the Kiev on Second Avenue at four every morning: enormous boiled potato pierogis shivering in pools of butter, little sides of sauteed onions, paper cups of pure sour cream, Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray, no ice, as a chaser, but now when the call comes I'm sitting in the kitchen with two plastic funnels over my breast and pump on the counter with its hydraulic suck and the cast iron sputtering of eggs, the kids already bickering at table, milk flowing into baby bottles, even now the word heroin makes me feel the lovely way a body can go slack from inside out. 3. A SINGLE DROP I'd never paid much mind to my implements, but now I paint "Fire Engine Red" on the handle of my razor, a single drop on my nail clippers, one long stroke on my lethal toothbrush to cordon off my blood, I tend and sop each splash or seep, soiled band-aids, love-smeared sheets-- every bleeding gum, torn hangnail, paper cut, scrape, gully of cracked lip another hazard, each infectious throb now forever watched as I patrol my body's raging arroyo in the family bathroom, to keep my children safe from me. 4. PAPER GOWNS X-rays, lab coat, and me wearing those delicate petals (gaping, cold through the sleeves). He asks me to extend my palms: the motion is of pushing away. Breathe with your mouth, he says, soft tup, tup tup, along my spine, as if checking a cantaloupe. There is a piece of gum beneath the windowsill, green imprint of a thub. We're talking percentages, genotypes, we're talking bundled pharmaceuticals. Studies, it seems, are inconclusive. I try to look at the big picture: a talc-free rubber glove at the edge of the trash, neither in, nor out. On the insurance card, raised numbers, black ink worn away. there's a girl on the street with her head back, the strap of her dress falling carelessly.

Posted by Scott at 11/03/2005 10:39:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

Last week and this week we've been covering questions in the simple past tense in my ELL class. Generally speaking, the formula is regular, you just have to remember the rules. 1. If a sentence uses a modal, auxiliary, or to be, simply invert subject and verb. "Kilroy was here" becomes "Was Kilroy here?" "We could smile" --> "Could we smile?" 2. If the sentence contains only an action verb, it needs do for support. "We went to purgatory" --> "Did we go to purgatory?" 3. If you employ a question word (wh-word), then the formula is "wh- + do/be + subject + verb (if be, then +ing; if do, then use base form) + optional components" In these cases, the wh- takes the place of the direct object. "I went to MalWart" --> "Where did you go?" "You are stupid" --> "What are you?" 4. I won't go into tag questions or questions that have no grammatical change, only inflected vocalization because we haven't studied these in class. This can get confusing though, as it did last night, because who and what questions have two common forms (it's possible with the other question words, but less common), one if you are inquiring about the subject and the other if you are asking about the direct object. Take, for example, "Natasha helped Boris catch Moose and Skwirrel." If you ask about the direct object you get "Whom did Natasha help catch Moose and Skwirrel?" and if you inquire regarding the subject, it is "Who helped Boris catch Moose and Skwirrel?" (Wh- + tensed verb + subject + optional components.) The same rule applies to questions about non-human subjects. "The squirrel flew" --> "What flew?" You never need do support if you are asking about a subject. For some reason though, no matter how many ways I explained it, it took people a long time to catch on. And then the book gave us examples that ended in prepositions. Ugh. I try to make sure the students know the "rules" but also how people actually speak, so I explained that who almost always replaces whom and that ending sentences on prepositions is discouraged in formal situations. "I talked to the Queen" --> (normal) "Who did you talk to?" --> ("proper") "To whom did you talk?" Strangely, after the whole direct object vs. subject tribulation, they picked this one up right away. What I dislike about Ms. Azar and this book in general is that they do this to me all the time. They insist on using examples of things without explaining them. Another rough day was when they decided to use some phrasal verbs out of the blue and I was stuck explaining them even though the students shouldn't have to face down that particular monster at this level. My point (and I do have one): We need to go back to Middle or Early Modern English. You know, like Shakespeare. Back then, do support was rare and optional. You could make a negative statement without it. Today we have to say, "I didn't go on a mad shooting spree," while back then they could say "I went not on a mad shooting spree." And you could ask the question, "Went you postal?" "Did you go postal?" is just so cumbersome. Simple subject/verb inversion. That's all I'm asking for. Other Germanic langauges managed to keep it simple, why not English?

Posted by Scott at 11/03/2005 10:30:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

Andrea's in a magazine. It's nothing that you can't see at her artfully-designed site, but it's nice to see her getting some recognition. If you happen to be in Minneapolis before 12 November, stop by the Bockley Gallery. Besides Andrea, it's got some pretty big 'shinob names like Norval Morrisseau and George Morrison. And with that, I will get back to my exposition of the role presupposition context plays in the usage semantic selection of the definite article. If you beg, I might just post my findings. I say this knowing full well that few if any people care.

Posted by Scott at 11/01/2005 11:10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

I just posted, but I also happen to think at least one person in the world might be interested in this dancing monkey posting more poetry. This is the poem I've been revising this evening (and my reason for still being awake). I just e-mailed it out to be workshopped at our next class (ENGL 853, Seminar in Poetry) and perhaps some of you would like to take a stab at being my editors as well. I can't say I consider it finished, but it has reached the point where other's eyes are necessary for it's continued growth.

Thoughts Concerning the Fountain in front of the Nebraska Union

Catapulted, kinetic force loaded, Drop finds himself suddenly independent, an organism distinct from the uncountable noun of his birth.

He shoots skyward, looks around, hopes someone is watching, sure of his role in life: to go high, to go higher, if possible, higher than any other energetic

drop, to refract particles of sun. He trades kinetic energy for potential and climbs until, transfer complete, for a moment,

just. one. moment .

he hangs motionless in the air. Perhaps he wonders at the majestic view, the colonnades, backpacks, and concrete—thinks the universe

conspired to create one sublime instant just for him. Or maybe the universe was created for this now? Perhaps he’s unsure of his role. Could I

have gone higher? Slowly curves the parabola, Drop grabs what light he can manage. The ascent dictated how he would fall: moment. one. just.

the descent felt in his molecules, ineffably wrong, ominous, but necessary; molecules know the way, they traveled this path as past drops, the way

back to uncountable. With a plunk and splash, Drop will be forgotten, dissected, and replaced in the spray by newer drops whom I will admire equally.

Background: This is not a Wordsworth poem, but somewhere in my head it deserves the title, “Intimations of Immortality.” Watching the mathematical chaos of a fountain can be mesmerizing and numinous. When I dig at those feelings, I find religious thoughts of transience and the beauty thereof. I hope this poem makes the instant of life something beautiful though it cannot quite replicate the beauty of the instant of refraction. It was written while reading Gaspar and thematic comparisons to him are in order though stylistically it is a very different creature.

Posted by Scott at 11/01/2005 03:58:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

Posted by Scott at 11/01/2005 03:09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments