A Brief Visit to DUMBO

 

 

The Mower

By Philip Larkin

 

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   

A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence   

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   

While there is still time.

In Harlem, today, 09/17/2022

 

Good Friday parade, Annunciation Church, Convent Avenue, Harlem

 

Good Friday on the Grand Concourse

To 170th Street and Grand Concourse in the Bronx, on Good Friday, April 15th, 2022...

 

Watching Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’ Again

From the outside world...

The surreal sci fi masterpiece, 'Stalker', directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, tells a jarring, dislocated story of a mysterious zone, inside which the normal laws of nature no longer apply. Guarded by a military force, the zone is occasionally penetrated by renegade guides, or 'stalkers', who will bring adventurers with them for a price. 

The 1979 film is loosely based on a Russian sci fi short story, 'Roadside Picnic', which describes superior alien beings who halt briefly on Earth, en route to somewhere or something else. The trash or detritus from their brief roadside picnic, is utterly mesmerizing to earthlings, and causes strange zones on the planet, inside which the alien discardings upend the laws of physics. 

...to inside the Zone...

In the movie, the transition from the polluted and wretched sepia-tinted world to the zone, manifests as full, saturated color. But despite its apparent natural beauty, the zone has an unsettling Garden of Eden quality, in which not much happens but the three characters seem to be stricken with extreme paranoia. The Stalker insists that the shortest and safest route through the zone is always a circuitous, backtracking maze. His comrades quickly find their minds riven with suspicion and misunderstanding. 

I'm probably a Philistine, but I almost wanted there to be more action in this slowly-unfolding story, ...and for once a remake might be a compelling project.... 

"Was it a meteorite or a visitation from outer space?

Whatever it was, in our small country, there appeared a miracle — the Zone.

We sent in troops. Not one returned.

Then we surrounded the Zone with a security cordon.

We did right... Although I'm not sure. I'm not sure."

Fabian, or Going to the Dogs

Tom Schilling stars as Jakob Fabian in "Fabian, or Going to the Dogs" (2021).

"Despite it all, life was a most interesting occupation" ~ adopted from Erich Kastner's novel, "Fabian" tells the story of earnest writer and man about town, Jakob Fabian, in late Weimar Berlin. Through a turbulent relationship with a rising film star, his friendship with a rich, idealistic young intellectual, Fabian's tragedy is seen against the larger tragedy of Berlin and Germany, on the slide towards Nazism. 

Bizarre Beach Detritus

 

"A hunk of human hair; a full set of dentures (“I TOLD you not to take your teeth to the beach!”); a thong; a used narcan kit (used to revive drug overdose victims); several marijuana bags (empty, of course); a bullet casing, and a fake eyeball were among items picked up" on New Jersey beaches in 2021.

There also was part of a bowling ball; a rainbow-striped women’s bathing suit (raising a rather obvious question about someone’s trip home); a highway traffic cone; part of a car windshield; a check for $1; an accordion and a harmonica, and a CD holder filled with albums by Limp Bizkit (perhaps the lone instance in which littering might be justified.)

A reminder of my long-ago photo series on random detritus. 

 

Love and Dread

By Rachel Hadas

A desiccated daffodil.
A pigeon cooing on the sill.
The old cat lives on love and water.
Your mother’s balanced by your daughter:
one faces death, one will give birth.
The fulcrum is our life on earth,
beginning, ending in a bed.
We have to marry love and dread.
Dark clouds are roiling in the sky.
The daily drumbeat of the lie,
steady—no, crescendoing.
This premature deceptive spring,
forsythia’s in bloom already.
The challenge: balance. Keep it steady,
now sniffing daffodils’ aroma,
now Googling a rare sarcoma.
The ghost cat’s weightless on my lap.
My mother’s ghost floats through my nap,
as, dearest heart, we lie in bed.
Oh, we must marry love and dread:
must shield our senses from the glare
and clamor of chaos everywhere.
Life bestows gifts past expectation.
It’s time to plan a celebration:
dance at the wedding, drink and sing,
certain that summer follows spring,
that new life blossoms from the past.
The baby is the youngest guest.
But just how long can we depend
on a recurrence without end?
Everything changes, even change.
The tapestry of seasons strange-
ly stirs in an uneasy wind
that teases dreamlike through the mind.
I reach for you across the bed.
Oh, how to marry love and dread?

Both at the same time?

 "Love and friendship each make a demand of loyalty and exclusivity that is likely to bring them into conflict."

We May Well Be Doomed This Time

 Yes, we should look to history to help us understand the present and the future, no, we should try not to be trapped into viewing the present through the lenses of the past (although this is almost impossible to avoid), but if ever there was an international crisis for which the term "spiral out of control like 1914" seems apt, this is it. And with the stakes infinitely higher, because... nuclear.