Looney Toons

If my lover can be struck
And crushed
To mush stuck to a truck
And if
My dog can fall
From a forty-foot cliff
(Beloved pet)
What’s next?
An anvil? A piano?
An exploding cigarette?


[Image from media.photobucket.com.]

False Start

Hell’s not just pain, it’s triviality—
A play that no one else would come to see.
Null dimension; crushing gravity.

“We suffer when we can’t let go,” they say,
“The self’s all just attachments anyway.
Unclench your heart and learn to love today.”

“Just bondage” seems reciprocal to me.
I’ll pay my creditors before I’m free—
To “let it go” would mean my bankruptcy.

Still others preach, “For us it has sufficed
To think about what Jesus sacrificed.
Repent your sins and give your life to Christ.”

If praising God with practices devout
Can free the soul from pain, regret, and doubt,
Why does it feel so much like “selling out?”

A colder voice sneers, “Fuck it, let’s be blunt:
Life is death. You don’t get what you want.
God’s a fiction; Gaia is a cunt.

“You won’t give up your dead biologist—
Her mangled hands, those dry, cracked lips you kissed.
You cursed God then—admit it, don’t resist.”

It’s true, and I’m addicted to that pain—
The wormy muse’s singular refrain,
The eggs it lays inside my beating brain.

I’ll rest awhile and then I’ll try again—
It’s hard work setting fire to these straw men.


[Image from walletmouth.typepad.com.]

Eva and Jeronym

Just needed a link to your picture, you old goat. Having met you even once, how could anyone ever forget you? Moc mi chybí.

(Eva Kronusová 1980-2006)

Happy Victoria Day

Since 1977, the spirit of Queen Victoria has probably kept more Canadians home from work than whiplash and sciatica put together. I plan on staying in my pyjamas until at least noon, and I'm raising a coffee and Bailey's to the old girl right now. Cheers!

Goodbye, Albert Hoffman (1906-2008)

Albert Hoffman died of a heart attack on April 29, 2008. He was 102. Hoffman was the first scientist to synthesize LSD. He also conducted research into the chemical composition of chitin.

Psychedelic technology, including drugs, has likely played an important and poorly understood role in human evolutionary history, and I think there is a place in the future of humankind for responsible psychedelic aesthetics and epistemology. However, the widespread use and abuse of LSD and similar drugs since the 1960's has resulted in numerous injuries and deaths. It's also helped propagate a superficial, irresponsible culture of "junk spirituality" that arguably paved the way for the worst excesses of the New Age movement. Hoffman, in any case, was a scientist rather than a drug guru. His gift to posterity is ambivalent but potentially very valuable as well.

(Alex Grey's wonderfully kitschy painting appears courtesy of www.reason.com)

Goodbye, Arthur C. Clark (1917-2008)

Arthur C. Clark had a very good run. In addition to being an excellent science fiction writer, he was also an accomplished scientist. Childhood's End is probably my favorite of his books, although I also liked Songs of Distant Earth for more sentimental reasons.

(Image from latimes.com)

Nature mort au crane

Pablo Picasso 1945. Oil on canvas. Click to enlarge.

(Anyone know how to get diacritics on Blogger?)

The Radiant Abyss

Orpheus loses Penelope when, as he makes his way back from the world of the dead, he looks back to see if she's actually following him. Likewise, in the Clive Barker story "Hell's Event," the humans competing in the foot race against Hell's runner are lost, one by one, when they look back over their shoulders toward the apparition at their heels.

An older woman I respect for being at peace with herself and the world once said to me, "You have to turn the page--move on." It seems like good advice, but I find it difficult to accept.

If we don't look back, then we forget. If we forget, then we betray the dead, even as we die ourselves.

(image from www.duniho.com)

Lord Brain 1895-1966

This post remembers eminent British neurologist Dr. Russell Brain, 1st Baron Brain, aka The Right Honourable the Lord Brain (1895-1966), author of Brain's Diseases of the Nervous System and longtime editor of the medical journal Brain. He was knighted in 1952, and cared for Winston Churchill on Churchill's deathbed in 1965 (Wikipedia).

Lord Brain must have looked in the mirror every morning and said, "I have the best name in the whole world."

The Fat Celt Wept

We're studying Japan and Korea in my grade 7 social studies class and this week, among other things, we've been talking about the atomic bomb. Yesterday I thought it would be a good idea to read Eleanor Coerr's Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes aloud to my students. Since I was in 4th grade the last time I read that book, I had forgotten just how sad it is. It's probably the saddest kids' book I've ever come across, after Charlotte Graeber's Mustard. So anyway, I got to the end, where it reads

The next time she awoke, the family was there. Sadako smiled at them. She was part of that warm, loving circle where she would always be. Nothing could ever change that.

Already lights were dancing behind her eyes. Sadako slid a thin, trembling hand over to touch the golden crane. Life was slipping away from her, but the crane made Sadako feel stronger inside.

She looked at her flock hanging from the ceiling. As she watched, a light autumn breeze made the birds rustle and sway. They seemed to be alive and flying out through the open window. How beautiful and free they were! Sadako sighed and closed her eyes.

She never woke up (Coerr 63).

and of course I had tears streaming down my face like a goddamn girl. Gah! I'm 6' tall, 240 lbs with a shaved head and a chinstrap beard and I'm crying like a baby in front of a bunch of preteens. All I could think to say was, "Sorry, guys, It's a sad book." It's part of my nature to be a sentimental mangina on the best of days, but I'm good at covering it up with my relatively scary appearance, deep voice and witty faux cynicism.

But not yesterday.

I'm not a "new age" guy. I'm not "emo." In fact, my wife can probably testify as to how insensitive I am. But I'm easily moved to tears by literature. That part in Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" when a dying Aricte cries, "Mercy, Emilie!" gets me every time. Never before, however, have I gotten all weepy in front of a class full of kids.

I guess the point of this story is twofold: a) I'm a big, bald pussy; and b) If you're going to read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes to a grade 7 class, practice in private and make sure you can get through it first.

Jezis Maria.

A Broken Heart Still Beats

There is a budding, a blossoming, a brief fruition (the texture, shape and significance of which the mind must go over again and again, vainly trying to discern exactly when "it" happened), then cooling, wilting, failing, falling, dying and rotting. So it goes.

Cliches become classics by virtue of sacrifice. Life isn't a pose (although it is a performance). It can't be faked.

Young people have their whole lives ahead of them. The tedium and anticipation are agonizing. Old people have theirs behind them, and the days go by like hours, the years like months. In between, life gradually gets colder and harder. It crystalizes.

It hurts to remember but it also hurts to forget.

There might be a seed or a sequence of letters hidden somewhere in/out there that has the power to redeem everything. It would be tiny, like a drop of blood in a Dali painting or a poppy pinned to a lapel (endorphins, enkephalins and dymorphins are opioids, after all).

(Evicko, chybiš mĺ).

Happy Birthday, Jack

My son John Charles MacEachern turned 1 year old on Friday, November 2nd. He shares this birthday with his maternal grandfather, Charlie Hunter.

November 2nd is also All Soul's Day, or the Day of the Dead. I bought a little mickey of Crown Royal to dump out on the lawn for the people who didn't make it this far, but I never actually got around to doing it. Oh well. I'm sure the dead llke Crown Royal just as much on November 3rd or 4th.

Post-Mortem Photograph

One of the nice things about the modern era is that infant mortality rates have been dropping steadily around the world. Overpopulation is a concern, but there's nothing sadder than a baby who doesn't make it.

Photo from the Kircher Society via a google search by the folks at Blog Supergroup.

The Parting of the Sensory (Carbon's Anniversary)

Whoever said that mind/body dualism is only a Cartesian fallacy was either young, high, or otherwise unusually free of regret. My own experience suggests that the body is pulled kicking and screaming into the future, while the mind (miracle of nonlinear computation that it is) is compelled to return to the past, like a fly to shit, like a tongue to a cut on the roof of its mouth. The body wants to return, but it moves on; the mind wants to move on, but it returns. Somewhere in this wretched in-between-ness, this Indian rope burn on the soul, the human subject can be found.

Death (hers) is irreversible, at least in this sad, dirty little stretch of monkey time that I inhabit. Some days it's light but grave, like a crow's wings brushing against my skin. Other days it's a fish hook in my guts, dragging me away from the people I love and need. Most of the time, though, it's just a guilty, impotent feeling--full of rage, shame and regret, and a terrible, terrible sadness. A ghost with a voice but no recognizable face. An exquisite and tuneless agony.

Thank God for family, without whom a disturbed and grieving mind might tear itself to pieces.

Sea Bricks Make Good Book Ends.

Divinity is grave.

Philosophy is its own consolation.

Gods rest you, H.P.

Autumn is Cruel

Autumn is a weird season. Its beautiful colours suggest a party or a festival, and soon enough the whole town is out in the street, revelling in the red and orange of Indian Summer--no one seems to notice that the band is actually playing a funeral march. Before anyone has even had a chance to sober up, the maple, oak and birch have cast away their garments to reveal their (suddenly?) inhuman anatomy, utterly indifferent to mammalian cold, hunger or loneliness. The sun turns gray, and the village is bathed in that awful autumn light, heavy yet thin, that gives no warmth and turns fond memories into angry ghosts. All bets are off when you're caught in that light. New friendships seem thin and cheap. One remembers the hard lesson, briefly forgotten with the rising of the sap, that love ends inevitably in pain, and great love in still worse pain. Life suddenly seems anticlimactic, linear, and very short. A cold, forced march at the end of which everyone dies. We bury or burn the dead in the hope that they'll leave us alone, or maybe that we'll leave ourselves alone. I never can. Not at this time of year.