Postcard: God Abides Indomitable

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The Three Stages of Reading: Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood

THE ALLEGORICAL

THE ANAGOGICAL

THE ONTOLOGICAL

Sound of a stick upon the floor, a sound

From somebody that toils from chair to chair;

Beloved books that famous hands have bound,

Old marble heads, old pictures everywhere;

Great rooms where travelled men and children found

Content or joy; a last inheritor

Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame

Or out of folly into folly came.

A spot whereon the founders lived and died

Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,

Or gardens rich in memory glorified

Marriages, alliances and families,

And every bride's ambition satisfied.

Where fashion or mere fantasy decrees

We shift about - all that great glory spent -

Like some poor Arab tribesman and his tent.

We were the last romantics - chose for theme

Traditional sanctity and loveliness;

Whatever's written in what poets name

The book of the people; whatever most can bless

The mind of man or elevate a rhyme;

But all is changed, that high horse riderless,

Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode

Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.

              - From Coole Park and Ballylee, Yeats

"The object impinged on my periphery."

Bone bird pecking at a skull, originally uploaded by mossko.

A dispatch from Ambassador G.:

From the book Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain by Michael Paternini:

(Harvey is the mentally deranged doctor who, years ago, stole the brain of Albert Einstein. Paternini accompanied him cross country on a road trip towards the end of his life, after he had been persuaded to return to the brain. Yes, this is a true story of the real world that we actually do live in.)

"A present?" says Burroughs, switching again, dissolving as suddenly into some ecstatic state of childhood. Wayne is in his forties, though wearing anoversized fatigue jacket--the uniform around here--and with his dark sweep of hair, he appears both younger and dwarfish. He leads the writer back to theDynachair . "Well, well, what could it be?" A happy soft-shoe. Harvey, too, is suddenly piqued, and sits with raised eyebrows--curious cat.

"We'll call it the Bone," says Wayne, disappearing into a dark corner of the house to retrieve it.

"The Bone!" cries Burroughs. "The lovely, lovely Bone!" Harvey is confused now, looking back and forth between Burroughs and Wayne, as Wayne gently places a huge wrapped object on the coffee table. Wayne reads a letter that accompanies it, from an anthropologist who found the following item while trekking in the Southwest. In describing the moment of discovery, the anthropologist writes something like "The object impinged on my periphery." And Burroughs gets stuck on that, starts repeating,"Impinge-on-my-periphery! Impinge-on -my-periphery! Impinge- on-my-periphery! " Then he falls on the gift with greedy hands, disrobing it in a crinkling fury, to reveal--what else?--a large brown petrified bone.

When Harvey sees it, he yells, "IT'S INFILTRATED WITH CALCIUM!" As if it's about to explode, and we all need to take cover. But having worked Harvey up into a climactic frenzy, Burroughs himself has disappeared into a mellow, post-coital reverie. "Absolutely magnificent," he whispers, far away, caressing it. "Feels like linoleum."