Notice
Following last month’s fire the Strenuous Administrations Committee has been reconvened, resolving to add the following prohibitions to Sub-section III of the Health & Security Segment of the Dormitory Regulations Code:
i) Cloying poetry, moonlighting banjos and/or burning violets are not permitted in bed, and
ii) Smoking brains is allowed only in area(s) designated for this purpose.
In an ongoing and earnest effort to scrub wanton disregard for residents’ mutual welfare (evidenced by overheating bedsides with moonlit brain smoking) from the halls of The Institution your Floor Representatives have unanimously ratified Prohibition ii. Regrettably prohibition i has been sent back to Committee for further research into causal links between poetry cloying, banjolit mooning, violing burnlets and smoking brains.
Effective forgetfully, spaces in the rear parking lot outside where doors eye, ear, nose and mouth should be, have been designated for the midnight smoking of brains. These spaces are never fully closed and well away from combustibles real or imagined. Residents may apply at the Strenuous Administrations Office for Special Brain-smoking Permits applicable during the term of their residence or/and to obtain Brain-smoking Day Passes while their applications for Special Brain-smoking Permits are under consideration by a Sub-committee of The Committee especially plucked for this purpose.
The Code does not require direct resident consultation for emergency amendments to the Health & Security Segment of The Code. Residents caught smoking brains in the designated brain-smoking area with neither a Brain-smoking Day Pass nor a Special Brain-smoking Permit will be subject to wretched lying.
Additional News - Tendrill practice tonight in the rear parking lot at 10:00, followed by a BBQ.
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Commentary:
My first thought was to look up Heine and the original poem. Knowing nothing of the man and being unable to read or speak German, I felt challenged and insecure as I so often do when confronted by superior intellect, which is to say damned near always, but I quickly realized that Gary hadn’t asked me to revise or comment on the original poem. Gary didn’t care what I thought of Heine or his poetry, but rather what I would do with what Gary thought of Heine’s poem. Gary had asked me to enter into his, Gary’s, mind and to finish his thoughts, not to relate my thoughts about Hiene’s (“Heine’s” – I must remember to place the “e” before the “i”, though it appears that Spell Check will catch both this and the subsequent linking of “Spell Check” into one word) thoughts. Or so I thought.
My second thought was that Gary should be doing his taxes. For several weeks prior to sending me the above e-mail, Gary had begged off performing work essential to bumPHead, another poetry project on which we were collaborating, claiming that he had to complete his taxes before a looming deadline. Knowing how insistent the taxman can be about such matters, I accepted this explanation but with the arrival of the above e-mail new insecurities were raised regarding Gary’s commitment to the original project. In bumPHead we occasionally, casually and tentatively engage in something similar to this proposed new project, gently editing each other’s poetic ideas but admittedly in something closer to song lyrics (though not actually song lyrics) so what was the meaning of this formal invitation to do the same thing in this Heine context? With further inspection came enlightenment: the e-mail was sent to a list of names. Gary was soliciting collaboration on his Heine project from an anonymous group, probably including me only because he felt guilty about his limited engagement in the bumPHead project. He was being polite.
Still, could I afford to resist this invitation and risk being entirely left out of another intellectual exchange, however improbable my inclusion in Gary’s blog? Well hell, I was pretty much in Gary’s bumPHead already, wandering the halls and opening doors to see what perceptions lay within. For me, Gary’s e-mail was more like an invitation to come down to the kitchen and discuss what I’d found.
But it’s not that easy. Not even if Gary offered to put on a pot of tea and Beth, Gary’s wife, had something fragrant warming in the oven. Gary connects words to images and images to emotions in ways that, frankly, I do not. They make sense, you see, but not in the sense you see. At least not straight away. And I don’t think it’s just me. I seldom find evidence of Gary’s logic anywhere but on the walls of Gary’s writing. Out in the broader fields of culture it’s maybe okay to like Gary’s poetry as long as you isolate it, wrap it in mental parenthesis, label it “amusing” and lock in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet in your home office.
This particular poem, for instance, has a “stop and smell the roses” quality, a sentiment understood and accepted to the point of cliché but it’s an obvious threat to the logic of mounting hub-caps on shiny new automobiles, or getting kids to soccer practice. How can anything get done if people have their noses stuck up the petals of roses all day? And things must get done! Plus, there are ears in the walls. It’s dangerous enough to think about taking a banjo to bed, let alone be caught musing aloud about what might be done with one there.
The steaks are high, and well they might be. When I say culture, as I just did in the preceding paragraph, I mean more than poetry, opera, Hollywood and yogurt. Culture is those things too, but at the same time it is collective thought, the communication both among individuals and between individuals and their collective(s), the thoughts that circulate through all manner of media, going around and around making connections with the fragility of a minute electric spark leaping across a tiny synaptic gap in an individual human brain, until general agreements are forged about ideas like the ideal shape of a vessel for the serving and appreciation of tea, when to serve tea in the kitchen or in the rehearsal hall and when the logic of such an accumulation of decisions is sufficiently violated as to threaten the cultural security of the entire collective so as to invite violet response.
Lately it appears that western culture cannot rely, as it has these past millennia, on violets being hard-wired into the human brain. How a body responds to a flood of adrenalin is in point of fact culturally determined, probably, it turns out, most likely. And this discovery arrives just as the wiring for an extra-organic human identity proceeds apace, with agreement of thought, a common goal and a single uniting idea necessarily more important than ever. It is as if the body has abandoned us while the mind spins off on its own like a growing b-movie blob, threatening to engulf the cultural certainty of violets and fear, or perhaps it’s the fear of cultural uncertainty and inviolates that are threatened but irregardless, the culture must fight the new brain’s leapin’ logic. To survive as we know it, culture must remember to forget and sometimes forget to remember, but appropriately, and not necessarily in that order.
What does it mean to have a foolish heart? Gary asks. Alas, unless we are careful, we may learn this answer too soon, too soon.
Slim Volumes
Slim:
Thanks for this, but aren’t you confusing violets and violents? Would you care to revise?
Up to you,
Gary
Gary:
Oh. Sure. Typical.
Slim.
