was a line about U-boats. A theme. But still, it makes sense, you know? It makes sense in the way if you dissemble and fidget it." “Be a swell friend if you can," he used to encourage us, as we walked down the stoop and entered a season. We thought we were so Bohemian then, those nights on 11th Street, when Bill rented that place in the Village, the one beside the one Eleanor Roosevelt kept during the Depression, toting our selves into rectangular rooms and churches, and dumpling shops, admitting, “There's more greenery in the city than you might imagine, travel along the side-streets, always." You, Bill, press screen doors open right in the center of the screen, so your hand crosses the frame before the door creaks. Screen enters and door follows. Where you'd be wearing that cummerbund you'd purchased at the MoMA—even if you were just moving us into college—covered in the art of Cezanne. “Cezanne was the best, Cezanne influenced everyone," informing, “and no one should place her feet on the coffee table la-la-la," though you'd let us (do lots of things) during summer vacation. When we moved north we spent an autumn tying remembrance knots, trying all the various possibilities, when Bill peeped—I remember it well it seems—“I told you what we'd do! That this would be neat!" Though he then whispered, mock-furtively, “the mathematicians have already figured all of these out. The formulas. Everything's been decided. But you know kid, you keep go on living. And you think. …The best things, for me, and for us, are the most difficult ones," and he'd fall asleep tying knots, forgetting to eat. And his eyes were always bloodshot, except in that one picture he liked to pass around around Christmastime. And which he put on his book-sleeves. He always liked to kneel and ask if he could help you, as his voice became that brief moment in space just before a knot is cinched. He helped many people that way. And that was when he felt most like a knight to me. And for others he wrote letters, on their behalf, helping them get in and out of things.

E)
There must be room, a lot, most room (by far!), for boredom and waste and repetition in this economy. Else the flux of ostracisms required? Else the wrath of democracy?

  or a raccoon, a skunk or something else un-suburban. We lived still somewhat un-suburban then. That went away, God knows. And every new McDonald's and multiplex elicited cheers, not lamentations. It is too hard living; we are fucked. The future debases; the past mocks. History orders agony as we drift through forests to find clearings where warfare can be waged more easily. I remember laying sticks and logs in that limp stream. And the image of you in pain, lapidary on the other side of Lethe.

F)
“It is impossible for me to imagine my life without my works of art."
—Ronald S. Lauder, letter from Neue Galerie museum president and co-founder discussing the exhibition, “The Ronald S. Lauder Collection: Selections from the 3rd Century BC to the 20th Century/Germany, Austria, and France," 10/27/11 - 04/02/12

Violence! Contingency! Human nature cauliflowering around on its belly between trenches with venereal disease…you cannot speak another's need! So drop bombs and wait…or sing melodramatic Irish play-scripts from the '80s, on escape and diminution, sloping loss, then love, industrial exodus: uxoriousness: O those Celtic ditties!!!!!!!

G)
Organism wrestle back. In June we tucked cucumber sandwiches
into our pants. Those lovely, really lovely, cucumber belts. In infinite rounds of ouroboros. Some of the same people relaxed.

Bone Method

—half a million chloroplasts in a square millimeter of mesophyll; gamma rays marking picometers while radio waves leap miles—it's engineer-less! God would'a been denied in a board meeting—go simple, my friend, clean lines, clean message. To a paramecium or a ribosome every masterpiece ever painted, from the abstract expressions in the basements of Manhattan to the Quattrocento altars of Milan to the scrolls of the Southern Song have been swabbed in blur on Rabelaisian canvases, ludicrous, immense!

And Kaiser von Phu, in the mid-15th century, proposed, under a lotus blossom: “Science is the only positive extinguisher of lust. Only botanists are happy and faithful." And a warm gust of rain blew about them, doing business in Venice in winter for King Wenceslas. “Only that disorders the mind so."
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