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The first pass is a wobbly one Arms out-stretched Tilting side to side Feet askew And flailing hands betide A fall to land in stumbled heap Again he leaps Again the feet Stand solidly atop the beam Now in the eye assurance gleams The hands hang limp Down at his sides While feet along the beam fast fly Until a wobble overeems Back up again, another run! This time the end is reached with ease Now balancing is just a breeze |
| date | 2000-10-27:15:09 |
| Creatures |
Once upon a time a nice man and a nice woman owned two cats, named Nut and Bolt. Nut and Bolt were brother and sister, and their first memories were of being kept in a glass box that was part of a wall made of other glass boxes, in a big building where lots of people walked in and out every hour. They couldn't read, but if they could have, they would have known that the sign across the hall from them read "Department of Biology." On one side of them was a glass box with some small furry creatures in it, creatures even smaller and furrier than they were. They thought it would be fun to kill them and eat them, if they could only figure out how to get to them. In the meantime, Bolt was a lot bigger than Nut, and so she used to wack him around for fun. On the other side of them was a Great Big Snake, the would sometimes stare at them for hours at a time, clearily thinking it would be fun to kill them and eat them, not necessarily in that order. Then one day the nice man and the nice woman came with the man who fed them, and picked them up and cuddled them and carried them off to a little house with a big back yard, where they grew up to be a fine pair of inquisitive cats. After a slow start, Nut finally got bigger than Bolt, but he never used to wack her around, even when she was being grumpy and yowly. Then one day the nice and the nice woman were walking to work, and a man on a busy street-corner said, "Did you see that cat? It was out in the middle of the intersection. Somebody oughta do something." He pointed to a small quivering ball of fur hidden under a parked car, and walked away, still muttering that "someone" ought to do something. The nice man didn't wait for Someone. He knelt down and held out his knuckles to the small quivering cat, who poked out her nose and looked up at him with great big eyes and then came out and rubbed herself against his knuckles and went, "PurrPurrPurrPURRRR." The light changed and the traffic started to move and the small cat froze and made to dart back under the car, so the nice man scooped her up quickly but gently and held her in his arms where she quickly stopped shaking. She settled herself inside his jacket and looked up at him with her great big eyes and went "PurrPurrPurrPURRRR" again. The nice woman said, "We can call the SPCA from work" and the nice man replied, "Ok." But he had other things in mind. The walked the rest of the way to work, and the little cat -- more of a kitten, really -- never stopped purring, rumbling against the nice man's chest. When they got to work the nice lady phoned the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and told them she had found a stray cat and could they come and pick it up, and what happened if the owner didn't claim it? She was told that they would keep the cat for a month, and if the owner didn't claim it and they couldn't find a nice home for it, then it would be destroyed. It was sad, but they didn't have enough room for all the stray animals, even though they tried to teach people to make sure their pets were spayed or neutered so there were fewer strays, people didn't always understand. The nice woman had to go off to a meeting, so the nice man stayed at her desk with the kitten still cuddled inside his jacket, where she curled warmly, all the time going "PurrPurrPurrPURRRR." A little while later the SPCA phoned back to say their driver was lost and needed extra instructions to find the building, and the nice man looked at the kitten, who was still looking at him with her great big eyes, and said, "Don't worry about finding this kitten a nice home. It's already found one." Then he called a taxi and took the kitten home, still curled inside his jacket. No sooner had he stepped through the door of the house than Nut and Bolt started to hiss and yowl, saying, "We don't want that thing in here!" The nice man locked the kitten in a bedroom with some food and water and a litter box, and went back to work, and when he came home that evening, having called the nice woman to explain to her that one small cat wasn't that many more than two big ones, he found Nut and Bolt outside the bedroom door, lurking with intent. Every now and then one of them would slide a paw under the door to see if they could catch the kitten on the other side. When he opened the door the nice man found the new cat, who he decided to call Pretzel, sitting perched high up on the pillows of the bed, far from the door, but still purring. That evening, the nice lady sat with Pretzel on her lap, and the other two cats circled round warily, eying the intruder with feline malice. But over the next few weeks they found that the world was not going to end, and eventually all three cats became great freinds, and travelled hither thither and yon with the nice man and the nice woman, and eventually wound up living in a big house with a huge back yard and a dog and two kids and a bushy field that streched on and on, forever. |
| Poem |
This topic started out as a place to put poems, but since my dear Caro has added a box where I could do that separately, I'll put comments on the poem here. Today's is called "Balance Beam" which I wrote while watching one of my children practicing walking on a balance beam at gymnastics a few days ago. This is one of the most important roles of poetry in my life -- it's the literature of small things, of moments, which are no less profound and important for being brief and transient. |
| Reading |
Finished The Count of Monte Cristo, and need to think about it a bit. Stayed up too late reading, and am a bit wozzy because of that. Does John Galt owe anything to Monte Cristo? They both have that unrealistic degree of control of their surroundings -- this is what makes it a fantasy; no plan ever survives contact with reality as well as Monte Cristo's does. It depends on too much stuff going right, and nothing ever goes right by chance. You've gotta make it work by effort and expertise and force of will. In general, we underestimate the likelihood of things going badly wrong. The book invites comparison with Atlas Shrugged if for no other basis than it's length, but the notion of a mysterious hero working secretly in the midst of his enemies for their destruction is common as well. In Monte Cristo's case we know all about his antecedents, which are very slightly more realistic than John Galt's, although there have been cases that should forstall claims about the unreality of self-created geniuses, Ramanujan for example would be decried as utterly unrealistic if he'd been invented by an author. Monte Cristo pursues justice on a much less grand scale than Galt, and the story is overall much more realistic. It's also told in a style, at least in Robin Buss' translation, that's eminently readable, whereas I have no idea how anyone who has read even a moderate quantity of good literature can stomach Rand's work, although I know people who do. Algis Budrys once said that Hitler offered Germans, "the promise that they would be able to do right, regardless of consequences". While no one sane would agree that this is what Hitler actually offered, it is certainly possible that that's what the ordinary Germans who supported him believed, and that's what characters like Galt and Monte Cristo seem to embody. They have powers beyond those of ordinary mortals to control events, and they remain (almost) untouched by the consequences of what they do. Monte Cristo is a far more realistic character than the cardboard cutout that is Galt simply because he is in the end touched by the unintended consequences of his actions, as are we all. Both men are also singular in purpose. Each is driven by a single goal that integrates their every action. However complex their stories, their lives are simple because of this -- they have only one priority to account for, no one else's needs to address. Monte Cristo describes himself as an egoist, and he's right in this, although he's not a rational or enlightened on. But there's a cleanness to his single-purpose life that most of us with conflicting desires and goals find attractive, at least in abstract. But of course, the reason why we have conflicting desires and goals is just because we want to be fully human -- we want to encompass all the joys and pleasures of experience; at least I do. |