Flowers and branches of the Boswellia sacra tree
Boswellia serrata is one of the things
I take to stave off the fulminations of old age;
It’s olibanum—frankincense, gift of the Three Kings.
But does it work? Who ever knows,
Comprehends body’s instinctual rage?
Saturday, July 12, 2025
I've never consciously imitated any poet (well, perhaps Auden a little), and most of the poetry I read these days in the publications that still see fit to print it strikes me as either too hard to understand, without great effort, or soppy. I can take a good deal of gush, and incomprehensibility has its place, but enough’s enough! My own poems are never satisfactory to me either. They tend to strike a didactic note, the English professor I never was or wanted to be making himself heard.
So I was intrigued by Lydia Davis’s collection Can’t and Won’t,* which consists of short prose pieces on quotidian subjects, some only a single sentence, others running for a few pages. Here’s an example titled “Housekeeping Observation”:
Under all this dirt
the floor is really very clean.
Writing like this may seem as easy as pie. It is and it isn’t. Or so I think.
To cut to the chose, I imitate Lydia Davis in what follows, mutatis mutandis.
Media regularly report on the excavated bones of our ancestors, which I regard as being in poor taste. What, after all, would you think of archaeologists who dug up your late grandparents, analyzed their DNA, and drew dubious conclusions (e.g., “This individual’s diet seems to have consisted mainly of BLTs and cheesecake”)?
The bones of ancient chieftains and their ladies are then deposited in the basement of some scholarly institution for an indefinite stay, a far cry from the pyramids or great passage tombs they and their people mandated, complete with sacrificed slaves, snacks and amphorae of wine to accompany them to Tartarus.
I wonder what future archaeologists might deduce from my own skull—assuming my cadaver is not disposed of by cremation or dissolved by alkaline hydrolysis, or aquamation (my present preference).
Three-quarters of a century of assiduous dentistry would immediately be apparent. We owned the candy store when I was a child, and I worked in it, serving from behind the counter at the age of eleven or twelve. My first dentist, I’ve blotted out his name, later committed suicide.
I’ve spent many hours and much money in dentists’ chairs in four countries on three continents, and the evidence would be only too evident from my fillings, bridges, root canals, and titanium implants.
My constant dental needs have entirely disappeared, however, since I gave up consuming refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Who would have thought it would be so simple?
*New York: Picador / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
Friday, July 11, 2025
Johann Jakob Schlesinger, portrait of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1831). Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it.
—C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956)
That’s one of the things we don’t learn from history,
Abstracting hallucinations for the by-and-by.
Hegel always bites off much more than he can chew,
And C. Wright Mills couldn't resist grand theory.
History’s better than a best-selling novel,
Do and die not recognizing a reason why:
In the end even the greatest crackpots groveled.
Faced with Nature’s late post-saurian mystery,
Predictably, in a quotidian of fouls,
An unkindness of ravens trumps a parliament of owls.
Thursday, July 10, 2025
