20 Oct 2013: Stayin’ Alive

Fell into a semi-coma for a day or so, backup, “stayin’ alive” in the ruins. Will try to resume the daily workout today with ten min on the stairs today, back to morning workouts tomorrow. These seances  due, perhaps, to simple exhaustion.

Awoke to pain following the usual Sciatic Highway but it is under control, as far as it shall be.

The extraordinarily clumsy input method, where 10% of characters entered have me throwing my arm across my torso to reach an alternative, is like trying to hack one’s way thru the swamp like Indiana Jones.

When in 1983 old Peter (junglee Peter!) discovered that he could swing from my arm he did so as if he was Indiana Jones!!!, yelling the eponymous yell as Peter (junglee Peter!) did so.

It’s official, and rather discouraging. Some possible internal fracturing may have been found as the cancer spreads. Studying how this works since more and more is learned and staging changes. Ignoring “life expectancy” estimates since these are so unscientific and I have done  what viatical things have needed to be done. 

Boots on the table with this thing, pain, since Dr. wants me not to disturb the others In this more communal society. TM (transcendental meditation) works. Even for a neophyte like me it works. But, of course, with medication.

But wait, more than a year with time for friends, money just enough, just enough, for the city? Things as always swell.

More later.

“What a Gift, a Window”

What a gift, a window.
Giving on to something unwilled
But magnificent in its own way,
Promising the more in its own way as the Flight to Egypt shows
Mary, with modest downcast eyes, led by
Joe.

Edward G. Nilges: Copyright 20 Oct 2013: Moral rights asserted

11 Oct 2013

20 Minutes first thing (50 midrise steps), 150 warmup movements, with and without weights.

Sunday’s first agon, was the one in which I first crossed the “screaming barrier” where you bother other patients and have “10 over 10” pain, which breaks the measuring device of your own perception and therefore means that the “actual” pain could be higher than 10/10 having such values as 12/10 (with, possibly, part of the pain being caused by not-knowing if Aristotle is right and we long to know), taught me among other things that I may need these lessons at the endgame.

With possibly a lifespan of months and those months spent in increasing unawareness and no more godlike mobility.

Which exacerbates, does not reconcile the need to know. In Sunday’s agon I was still the observer, trying to store up “impressions” for my “journey” like Flashman’s blasted wife Elspeth in Madagascar or Boswell in Scotland…and making  a dog’s dinner of it, scupper my kidneys, else.

Which exacerbates and does not reconcile my need to be with my son and my granddaughters.

The Chorus begins, softly, with quiet cymbals, at first a confusion of voices and instruments later triumphant…

Pace we slow pace we soft
For ’tis known how well and oft
Philosophy comes a cropper at the solemn time of death

Pace we slow pace we soft
For ’tis known how well and oft
That proud man the cynosure of Nature
Is at Nature’s mercy at the limit beyond the Pillars of Hercules

Pace we slow pace we soft
For as Oedip knew so well
There’s none can tell
Whether beyond this life there’s reassurance
For he who has worn life’s many harsh robes of  ‘durance

28 Sep 2013: Things Fall Apart, the Center Cannot Hold

20 minute workout first thing. Only 126 steps using lowrise stepper since did not warm up properly and the fist 100 were painful in consequence. Duh, so warm up using supine aerobics first.

Plan for tomorrow: warm up, supine aerobics as needed to avoid todays problems. Go from a weightless supine warm up to one with weights to one sans weights with weights with 300 total motions, transitioning as needed. Then do 100 midrise steps. Then cool down supine with and then without weights. Shoot for 30 minutes.

I have fallen permanently behind on all my planned projects because of the demands of disease: things fall apart. I wonder what it’s like to flunk a MOOCC (Massively Online Open Courseware Course). Does one flunk “massively” with headlines all over the world, NILGES FLUNKS MODPO? For I definitely won’t be able to keep up with Al Filreis’ MOOCC based at Penn on Modern Poetry, owing to this “fell sergeant”, stage IV prostate.

My last effort was most of an essay on Emily Dickinson’s use of poetic levels (lexical in rhyme and scansion, grammatical and then in terms of meaning. But in the afternoon planned for writing I fell asleep.

I really hate being once again incomplete in justifying my demands for Recognition.

In seeking Recognition
As we always seem to do
Remember, ’tis Importunate:
To thine own Self be True.
And when the Self in search of wealth
Or what it always is in want, Approval,
Loses the thread behind the curtain
It must wait for rescue by a kitten.

Edward G. Nilges, with again profuse and by now insincere apologies to the Belle of Amherst

9 Sep 2013: Coursera che sera, sera

20 minutes first thing: 300 lowrise steps (a lot of pain at first), 100 movements without weights. Physio later today in all probability.

Have started Coursera MOOC (Massively Online Open Courseware): my trial class is Modern American Poetry. I shall need to manage expectations and not even try to overwhelm the class with my so-called brilliance: it is a reality distortion field that sucks the air out of the room, to use two metaphors (more precisely a simile and a metaphor); it creates resentment.

My main Coursera goal is to get a certificate for each class I take and this means quite a lot of boring work. It appears that the business model for Coursera is the crowd-sourcing of the testing of courseware so it can then be sold to universities and used in for-credit classes. Nothing is free, and the simultaneous benefit of a class and a piece of paper (that can be used to get jobs teaching creative writing in this class’ case) means I will get minimal access to poet and teacher Al Filreis at Penn.

I will be graded by my so-called peers and I am such a butt-awful snob that this could be a Coriolanus level disaster, meliorated only by my seeing it from far off this time. But I really hate it when the father-teacher abandons me to the siblings.

We start this week, however, with two poets I know and love: Emily Dickinson the introvert who like Rosalinde (As You Like It) doesn’t see the value of travel and Walt “Walt” Whitman who roars about and never met a man he didn’t like, who has wide sympathies. Emily would not use Facebook, Walt Whitman would love it. So while I love Emily the Ds poetry (many tough extravert guys strangely do) and while I can even pastiche it, Walt Whitman is for me in many ways more fundamental.

Meantime, my self-administered, pre-Coursera class in Kant, the ewige Kant class which like a constructive infinity or ABD PhD stretches out before me fading into the distance, since I haven’t yet, objectively speaking, understood the Transcendental deduction nor grokked the whole better than Heidegger or Strawson. What the heck, it’s fun.

My reading of Johansen by comparison as easy as pie as his magnificent chapters pass in review. I’m on Plato and shall be reading some dialogs as part of the “course”. I always get the sense when re-reading the Republic that it (philosophy) is all here in the sense that all remaining philosophy can be found in the Republic.

It is possible to overemphasize this. I was very glad to read Rawls and not Plato at that one class I was privileged to take at Princeton in political philosophy: yet Rawls is but a refinement of Plato in so many ways: the Rawlsian upper crust, whose income increase benefits the least well off with public libraries, public pools, and the Ginza mall in the poor community of Tin Shui Wai, can be considered a Guardian class. Indeed, I thought that the Yuppies were going to constitute a public-spirited Guardian caste. I was wrong.

The Guardians have left their posts.
Ghosts
Flit in and out of the desert temple,
Ravenous for soulmeat,
And brother feeds on brother,
A pile of books for sale with loose cigarettes, tobacco dust, chicken offal.

28 Aug 2013: “When LOVE, at portal to an Other’s fair”

When LOVE, at portal to an Other’s fair
Perceives something awry, it doesn’t rush in
To where an Angel with bright bedabbl’d hair
Holds up the gleaming sword of hell and sin
“This other’s bright fair may not be for you”
“If in dull seize you crush its life and truth”
“And leaving you both chain’d in wilds of Zoo”
“And naught but regret and verifiable ruth”
“Which poor Fool you didn’t advantage”
“Now that nobody’s vouch’d your truth”
“Leaving you prey solitary to fear and rage”
“Like a loser, like Oswald, or like Edwin Booth.”
Yes: Love, when made wise through life’s hard annoy,
Stops you at the doorsmile lest your joy it destroy.

Edward G. Nilges 28 Aug 2013: copyright 2013 by Edward G. Nilges: moral rights asserted

26 Aug 2013

20 minute workout (down from planned 30 owing to very light nausea during step aerobics): 175 lowrise steps, 250 weight movements supine.

Study

Rereading Paul Guyer on the core of the Critique: the Metaphysical Deduction (the Clue) and the Transcendental Deduction. The Metaphysical Deduction is, I am now more confident, based on apperception as judgement. “I am having a sensation of red” is among other things a judgement.

“Hey man, I’m havin’ a deja vu.” – Cheech and Chong

In the Transcendental Deduction Kant reuses the arguments of the Clue and adds further to show that all experience is formed by and comes in the form of one or more of the Categories of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Modality.

“Crime is Crime”

“Crime is crime is crime; it is not political.”

Margaret Thatcher’s and Ayn Rand’s pithy ravings often oversimplify ontologies (“there is no such thing as society” per the Thatch) and they stress the identity of concepts which also oversimplifies.

This is a great comfort to confused people.

Margaret Thatcher’s vaporings have the virtue of making the issues clear.

The Mad Woman said “crime is crime” when Bobby Sands and other IRA prisoners were striking for humane treatment in prison. The problem is that “crime” is not “crime”.

“Let’s go do some CRIMES.” “Yeah, let’s get sushi and NOT PAY.” – Repo Man

“Crime” in legal theory and legal reality requires two “things”: actus reus (act thing, or a bad act) and mens rea (mind thing, or a guilty mind). The problem with most political crimes is no clear mens rea. Why should anyone feel guilty for trying to secure something they believe in at risk of liberty, life and limb? George Washington didn’t feel guilty.

Mens rea is found in the Catholic theology of the mortal sin, which must be a grave matter with malign intent (mens rea) according to the priest I spoke with on my re-entry to practicing Catholicism.

I was concerned with the obsessive-compulsive nature of my Catholic practice in 1962, of which the grand finale was an internal police state or Inquisition…I actually proved to myself that any mortal sin, that was known to another, created the equivalent mortal sin of scandal to others, and the sin of scandal created another such sin, and so on to a grand Cantorian non-denumerable infinity.

A reading of Greek tragedy rescued me from this nonsense.

“Grave matter” means that a genuinely mortal sin might only occur in he Oval Office when the President decides to bomb another country, or in a corporate office whose CEO decides to close a plant and destroy a community. I no longer think they meant me in 1962, twenty years after the discovery of the death camps.

Now, terrorism itself deconstructs the mens rea. Both Franz Fanon and the film Battle of Algiers ask the question: can a revolutionary, pushed to terrorism by the injustice of a colonial regime, resort to terror with the mens rea of a just man? I don’t know the answer but very many people would change their negative answer (the answer of the breakfast-scoffing Papa who purples, saying, “terrorism is terrorism” in an echo of Thatcherite and Randroid self-identity) when they are strongly pro-Israel and the question becomes whether Israel can go extrajudicial, medievally so, on terrorism violence in Gaza.

And nearly all breakfast-scoffing Papas in the West would change their answer when the question became terrorism against the Nazis, the Thule of modern day debates over these issues.

We think (I think) that a decent chap should not feel guilty if his country is taken over by Nazi Space Monsters from the Planet Gorkumbo and given a new constitution defining rebellion as treason simpliciter.

Whereas if he sells his country out for cash we think he’s a douche-canoe who should have *mens rea*, a guilty mind.

Now this neglects the category of the psychotic who precisely does not have mens rea, and who fails to introspect or feel guilty (which Margaret Thatcher never did according to even sympathetic biographers). But let’s say the psychotic is a psychotic precisely because she doesn’t feel guilty.

Bobby Sands probably didn’t feel guilty for either the bombings or the strike in prison. You may think either or both actions were wrong but you cannot say that Sands agreed with you when he performed the actions (where we can analytically replace value-overloaded tests with value-free statements about who agrees with whom).

If we agree that Ireland should be independent after almost a thousand years of oppression then we don’t think Sands was psychotic. If on the other hand we think Ireland should be a part of a UK, if that’s more liberal (many thoughtful people have felt this way including John Stuart Mill) then we might think Sands was psychotic but we don’t have to. I for one don’t see why the world should have in all cases to fragment down to the smallest political units which places me on the side of some empires, but we’re examining how we think when we agree with someone’s political gestures.

Our “feelings”, actually settled common law about mens rea, are why it is a marker of democracy and decency that political prisoners be treated with what breakfast-scoffing Papas call “kid gloves”.

In the Nazi death camps, a distinction was made between political and nonpolitical prisoners but it flipped the usual polarity. Contrary to democratic practice, the criminal inmates were treated as superior to the politicals and placed in supervisory roles over them. Arguably the average IRA prisoner was treated worse by British coppers than good old Mick the recidivist bank robber.

It wouldn’t have cost Britain much to treat the IRA prisoners the same as “criminals”, perhaps a bit better, and, better treatment as compared to criminals with guilty minds might have led to an earlier settlement and saved many lives.

It certainly worked in South Africa. Nelson Mandela, previously thought to be a terrorist, was in the late stage of his imprisonment, “coddled” and treated better because the regime realized the Madiba’s mens rea.

The fall of Communism didn’t result in WWIII in large part because both sides, Communist and reformist, took their opponents’ mens rea seriously. Gorbachev dealt with the conservatives (the unreformed Communists) as if they were sincere, and they dealt with him honorably for the most part. Outside of Romania and Yugoslavia this avoided a lot of conflict.

However, capitalism, having destroyed Communism, adopts one of Stalinist Communism’s tenets, “objective guilt”. Your “objective guilt” may emerge at any time in tendencies to be a “wrecker”. Your intentions, comrade, don’t count. 12 hour days? Not relevant.

A stalinist-era diary reveals that an engineer expressed enthusiasm over building a dam only to be told, “we don’t want your enthusiasm”. You hear this crap in corporate “performance reviews”.

“Objective guilt” in particular and a brutalized “objectivity” in general is not much different than in the lower reaches of the all-powerful corporation, where one has to tread carefully when one isn’t graced by favor. You may be “objectively” found an enemy of your employer’s corporation whether you know it or not because it’s too costly (in almost all cases today) to follow traditional legal procedures or use traditional legal concepts such as mens rea. Cheapjack administrative law and a form of summary execution from the corporate point of view often follows, and the suspension or sacking.

The elimination from Western law of the controlling factor of good or on balance bad motivation takes away something the ordinary, apolitical and law-abiding citizen needs: the ability to know whether she’ll be going to jail. From an amoral economic standpoint, even criminals and prospective criminals need this knowledge, which allows them to “rationally” avoid bad acts. We all must be “rational”.

Mustn’t we.

Take a look at this video, viral in late 2011, of an ordinary bank customer being taken into custody, roughly, by a crowd of uniformed and non-uniformed cops and agents. The Citibank customer was not dressed as were the protestors for jail. She expected to be judged on her mind thing, her mens rea was neither that of a common criminal seeking to disrupt bank operations (perhaps to carry out a robbery: cf. THE BIG KNOCKOVER by Dashiell Hammett) NOR that of a guilty terrorist with naughty mens rea.

The Dashiell Hammett story is particularly interesting as a fiction which the reflective reader (that is, the reader who doesn’t regularly read policiers), will find informed by a unique tonal quality. The idea of a shadowy gang of organized criminals (a sort of Batman trope) is highly fictional to the point of weirdness to the non-policier addict because we rarely actually find such cohesiveness in “organized crime”.

If “easy Kant”, that is of the far more engaging and above all understandable chap who wrote on ethics and aesthetics is to be believed then the lack of trust found among thieves would make it difficult for organized crime to attain the level of the corporation. Many thoughtful people consider the corporation to be organized crime: das ist ein anders: it requires theorizing the social role of the corporation in which economic fear becomes the willingness to cooperate.

Back to the Citibank customer arrest video.

In a barbaric fashion the citizen can no longer “choose” (the right) shibboleths in speech and writing but must use them lest she fall under suspicion: in the corporation of being a wrecker “objectively” and therefore in an unappetizing way she may be arrested as in the video by an absurd number of operatives or in the corporation, led by Security to her car at any time. How strange: this rather resembles Marxist and not English or American jurisprudence.

Despite talk, now somewhat outdated, about “ambulance chasing lawyers”, “criminals” and the law’s delay, the reality is that the assault on mens rea has made traditional jurisprudence a luxury for the 99%, with traditional jurisprudence replaced by a circus featuring kangaroo courts and “victims rights” advocates dancing amidst burning tires. You cannot get affordable and competent legal representation in Hong Kong where I live.

cf. Leszek Kolakowski’s monumental study of the Main Currents of Marxism. Pure everyday damage (personal and environmental) extending up to psyche-wreckage at Beria’s level, at the level of Stalin’s nuclear family, and even in Koba himself explains the content of Stalinism and its perverted “objectivity”. Personal and environmental damage also explains corporate “objectivity”. The hell of a modern commute may explain corporate “objectivity”.

Of course, a commute can only partly explain anything. But a synecdoche such as the heat and insects in an unemployed engineer’s car (Falling Down, 1992) can represent everything by way of … the breaking point.

“Life Draws Us On”

Life draws us on, smiling,
As if it were a shopkeeper, showing us treasures,
Offering us bargains to be had for the bargaining,
Surprising us we who thought we had taken life’s measures,
Until we end up to our considerable amazement
A room next to the stairs that lead down into a dank and dark basement
Filled with mementoes from all the record of our days. Haze
And haze only is white and visible thru a grimy back-window
Across which, shadows flit.
But life draws us on, smiling.

Edward G. Nilges 26 August 2013. Copyright (c) 2013 Edward G. Nilges

Change Record

26 Aug 2013 Miscellaneous changes
26 Aug 2013 Poem added
26 Aug 2013 Image added

22 Aug 2013: “wee’l go to Supper i’th’ morning.”

Workout after all: first thing, 6 AM, 20 minutes after only 3 hours of sleep since my eyes popped open at the usual time. 100 lowrise steps (down from last time owing to lack of sleep), 500 supine motions 250 with weights, and as a treat, 25 dance moves, second session this week up from 10, kept low to see if they cause hip or other pain. Cool! Will retire at 8:30 PM tonight.

Lear
Make no noise, make no noise, draw the Cur-taines:
So, so, wee’l go to Supper i’th’ morning.
Foole
And Ile go to bed at noone.

William Shakespeare, King Lear

ODE, in the Sonnet Form, for the Anti-Shakespearean Wight

According to British poet and critic Annie Martirosyan writing in Huffpost UK, what I have called “Shakespeare Denial” (the denial of the proven fact that the author of the plays and poems commonly thought to be William Shakespeare of Stratford was that wight) suffers a body blow in the failure of that foolish 2010 film Anonymous and in the new book that’s reviewed by Martirosyan so expertly. Here’s my “sonnet in form, mock funerary ode in feeling” for the “anti-Shakespearean wight”.

For even as a strong oak tree survives
The storm of winter and the summer rain
The harbinger of the winter of our lives
The cruelty of spring its promise and pain
Our Shakespeare he’s survived Devil’s night
The capering and gibbering of apes
When many a sad failed cashiered wight
Seeks “the bubble reputation” in rapes.
Rapes first of truth on the all-easy Web,
Then of the reputation of former friends
And as sanity and life doth through self-abuse ebb
His cause of destruction ends.
Carried by two paid mourners to his grave
Sigh a prayer for him Our Lord to save.

Grieving the Death of My Son Using the St Matthew Passion

Listen!

Bach’s St Matthew Passion is a work of genius and here’s an excellent YouTube Samizdat version, probably I should not listen to it since it’s de minimis illegal and in listening to it one walks on holy ground. And does it cheapen the death of my son?

When my kind brother said
Your son is dead
Why did the sun keep shining?
And God said, Ed, give me a break tho’ your heart it is breaking
What on earth do you want Me to do
If it had started raining as if on cue
You’d complain too.
I was trying to make you feel good, you stupid bastard
Your life is long and your life is hard.

Edward G. Nilges 23 August 2013 Moral Rights asserted.

But if you do, you scamp, listen as the guilt ridden grown-ups of the main choir practically scream “Seht! Wohin? Auf unsre Schuld!” As they do, it’s as if a mob of kids crept giggling onto the stage and started singing and dancing for it’s where the Knaben-chor (boy’s choir) cuts in.

Change Record

23 Aug 2013 Altered “Rapes first of the truth on the all-easy Web,” to “Rapes first of truth on the all-easy Web,” to improve pentameter scansion

23 Aug 2013 Added St Matthew Passion link and poetry credit

23 Aug 2013 Added two last lines to second poem (“And God said”)

20 Aug 2013: Triumph, Disaster, Triumph

IF you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat these two impostors just the same …

– Kipling

Post Blog 19th August – a Great Day and then Disaster

…an expedition with my main British mate to resolve issues with HSBC and visit IFC, with me in a wheelchair.

Snagged Lindt choc bars at the divine levels of 70% and 85%, where the bitterness of the 85% cacao solids added creates a delayed release of chocolate’s powerful pure flavor AFTER the bitterness, like a fine wine or polyphonic music:

–Flavor release 1————–
…..|
…..|
…. +–Flavor release 2————–

And…no pain whatsoever by way of a strange law: spending time in public with people at least as smart as you, is a marvelous analgesic.

But first…yesterday’s most incredible development: I was waiting in the cab queue at Queen Mary, standing temporarily as my wheelchair was loaded into the boot of the cab, and I found myself, without any pain, executing dance moves. I was thrilled and immediately resolved to experiment with a few more in my next workout, gradually increasing them as is needed and as would be possible.

Well, of course, that’s just not on now owing to disaster at end of day 19 August. For as I got ready for bed, my rib started to pound with pain. I’d probably banged it in a fall on the 17th, running for the can. Or it may be, frighteningly enough, a manifestation of metastasis to bone, a feature of prostate cancer. As I crawled into bed, minutes before so smug, I could hardly draw breath.

“I that in heill was and in gladnes
Am trublit now with great sicness
And feblit wi’ infairmitee!
Timor mortis conturbat me.

William Dunbar, Lament for the Makarys

I was given morphine (Fentanyl synthe-morphine) and like any person in pain, from the drummer boy lying on the field of Saratoga or Waterloo to a rich lawyer whae helpis no conclusionis slee my “study” was reduced to what I could do to stop, or endure, the pain. Thinking and feeling hard I realized that I needed to get the pain under the threshold set by my subjective pain (10/10) to have a chance of sleeping (and thus eliminating or reducing the pain) and to do THIS, I needed to … reduce my breathing.

To do THIS, I needed to reduce my activity so, no pounding on the pillow in agony and no picturesque sobbing and grimacing.

Relax in order to focus all energy on the breath.

Which worked after a while. And I slept, a gift, until morning.

When I awoke just before congee of course no workout was “on” and grimly the pain was the same. I struggled thru breakfast.

But…amazingly not only have I had no hip (cancer) pain all day as if my Hip Devil was deferring to my chest devil as a better tormenter than he…that in fact the pain was in the mind, forming one of Adorno’s strange constellations (“Dream Notes”) in the night sky of my illness to signal me that intelligence was behind my pain…perhaps, my intelligence.

The chest pain was minimal by early afternoon and all the above was me pitching a fit, or, more likely, thinking hard under pressure and finding solutions, or most likely, thinking hard under pressure, finding solutions…

…and, of course, pitching a fit.

Even tho the above was pretty much a false alarm…

with this new pain I was back at square one, searching for the limits of my new world like a man in a dark chamber who probes the shape of the wall, like Kant transcendentally exploring the limits of sense and reason in the dance of pure reason.

Kant was trying to discover how the dance of reason can take place. Imagine a room with shapes in black curtains, protruding from the wall:

How can the dance of darkness and pain take place?

How did the Irish Dancer dance in the holds of ships escaping the famine?

Imagine trying literally and figuratively to dance in the space provided by pain without passion and without hatred, for

“La mission est sacrée, tu l’exécutes jusqu’au bout et si besoin, en opérations, au péril de ta vie.”

“Au combat, tu agis sans passion et sans haine, tu respectes les ennemis vaincus, tu n’abandonnes jamais ni tes morts, ni tes blessés, ni tes armes.”

Articles 6 and 7 of the vow of the French Foreign Legion enhanced with my poetic feu de joie et l’honneur which I write “drawing my breath in pain” as Hamlet admonished Horatio, for indeed it is honorable to do so when recounting tales of honour, contes de l’HONNEUR:

Vow, of the Legionnaire of the Legion of the Endurance of Pain

Legionnaire, remember, the mission is sacred
Carried out to the bitter end, without hatred!
Carried out with utmost respect for the vanquish’d
As YOU would be treated as you would have wish’d
In storm of stress you keep your shit wired together
Keeping your weapons clean in fine and foul weather!
Abandon not your dead nor your wounded nor your arms
In the name of bright Honour, even in defeat, risking all harms.
And in victory never may you succumb to cowardice’s charms:
Abusing prisoners, or capering like an ape
And above all no violence against women. Rape
Is a coward’s act
You will be held fast to this pact.
Here, finally, is our most treasured possession as Legionnaires:
The leather strip we bite upon
When wounded so as not to betray our mates or our position.

Threnody Français

La France est ton Pere, la Legion c’est ton mere:
Vous est nous heros vous est nous enfants plus cher
Faire vous la combat au l’outrance comme l’audace
Et l’audace et toujour l’audace!
Et l’honneur brilliant, comme le Soleil
Qui grace votre armoire de la noir hey hey hey.

Edward G. Nilges 20 Aug 2013: Copyright 2013 by Edward G. Nilges: Moral rights asserted.

AND…lest there be any smart remarks…this is a matter of life and death and if I have to write poetry to stay alive then by GOD I shall.

No pain evening of the 20th.

“For Thou didst not leave his soul in hell, nor didst Thou suffer Thy holy one to see corruption.”

14 Aug 2013: Etude for August

“Let me be your father”, said the pain,
“Let me be your big brother”
“And all this will be just a bovver,”
“A smallish sacrifice on the floor.”

If I let you be my father, said I,
If I let you be my brother,
Will I then live forever?

No, said the pain, no no no it said
Get that idea out of your head
If you let me be your father
It will just feel like it
It will just feel like forever
And between you and me
Welcome to eternity.

Edward Nilges Copyright 14 Aug 2013 (c) by Edward G. Nilges. Moral rights asserted.

27 July 2013

20 minute workout in 10/10 (agonizing) pain at 5:56 AM: pain owing to the pulling and stretching of nerve over the last two days will hopefully settle down. Today I’ve resolved to work through sciatica and other obviously cancer source pains in workouts because the workout is that important.

Levels of pleasure/pain starting with pleasure as negative numbers and going to positive for pain. Which makes little sense.

-2000/10 You know what, the big O
-1000/10 Abnormally great exercise high (London Marathon, etc)
-100/10 Normal exercise high
-50/10 Conversation with someone smarter than me
-2/10 Something interesting on YouTube
-1/10 Feeling that the Fentanyl is kicking in
0/10 Where it’s proper to be, probably (that’s a poem!)
1/10 I’m a pussy for even mentioning it
2/10 pussy pussy pussy
3/10 Whoa now
4/10 Bang
5/10 #$%%!!!!
6/10 Ai-yah!!
7/10 Ourfatherwhoartinheavenhallowedbethynamethywillbedone …
8/10 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIYAAHHHHH!
9/10 SHOOT ME NOW (my kid comes up pokes his head over the bed and says bang!)
10/10 Silence and alert awareness of the pain whilst Buddhist and Christian texts float through my brain and my body making my pain go negative as they sync up with Fentanyl

Neutrality?

Is where it’s proper to be, most of the time, and probably.
You don’t wanna be
The Queen of Germany, always in a rage like Gilda was
On the old Saturday Night Live, for that’s the buzz.
It is best to be the land of the Swiss,
Or a countree you never even heard of
Hast thou ever been, has thou ever seen
Oh San Marino, or Lichtensteen?
That’s the point, my lord, emulative be
Of Brigadoons real. Seek thou the seacoast
Of Bohemia and the Terra Nullius of
Australia
Where men’s head do grow beneath their shoulders
And some are hazardous and anthrophage.
But until thy wound is healed through His grace
I shall take thee to safer place.
I shall take thee
To the lost Duchy of Grantham so fair
Or a country Utopian whose name means, nowhere.
Do not rage for earthy fame:
For from it comes death, ignominy and shame.

Edward G. Nilges 27 July 2013: Copyright (c) 2013 Edward G. Nilges, moral rights asserted.

I did flatten out my bed and sleep with the problem left leg extended, and last night’s sleep was better than the two previous nights so we’re perhaps on the right track. I have Chemo in the coming week which may also help. I flatter myself that the Chemo and exercise are working but we’ll see.

If I have five years that’s a lot of water under the bridge. If I have six months I will have spoken to the new GrandBugs Tessa and Esme, and using my phone time, told them stories like I used to tell peter.

But I need to return to the narrative of this morning’s rather frightful but profitable workout. Hope it’s not too scarey!

With a horrible rictus, and with my face in the window of my room at ground floor level, I did first 100 lowrise steps with aerobic agony and carcinogenetic pain, like a Lovecraft daemon: the Face at the Window:

“For now I wake up screaming from dreams of Yog Soth’oth and the face, screaming at the window. The devil of it, Madison, is that it’s a handsome, white, European face, manly-lined and etched with care: yet it terrifies me as no Black-a-moor’s or Chinaman’s [1] face could. I think, and I ask you to shoot me after I tell you, that it is our Edward’s face.”

It is fortunate that I workout this way consistently at dawn so some kid doesn’t see me. Children and adolescents read inferior books about “The Horror” whereas I seem to be passing through it, the Heart of Darkness. But Lovecraft when he fell ill learned to make terms with the Beyond. We have to no choice.

Religious faith helps in particular my trust in the Harrowing of Hell’s having locked Satan, his Imps and other supernatural beings such as witches in Hell. I don’t think some Goody wife is a witch even if she goes abroad cursing and muttering. For one thing I often go abroad cursing and muttering even though I am not a broad.

But my views are found nowhere in the official Church’s teachings although hate-filled and neurotic doctrines including the belief in exorcism remain. These doctrines, while they provide wicked fodder for reporters anxious for cheap thrills, are to me repugnant and I don’t accept them.

I then walked to the stairwell and did fifty stair steps. Then I climbed and descended one half a flight of stairs, and returned to bed…but stopping the exercise caused, unexpectedly, a great deal of pain, more than when I was “the face at the window”.

The great male nurse C admonished me for screaming as I threw myself on the bed and he was right. The pain was caused by voluntary actions and the dawn hours are for us often the only time when we get continuous alpha level sleep and Pain stops lashing many of the homeboys, so it is inconsiderate to scream in pain between 3 and 7 AM approximately.

[Stamp and Crash, all rise, announcement!]

Officers and gentlemen do not scream in agony and are advised so to counsel other ranks! Leather strips are available for biting! Right. Right? Right. RIGHT!

[Stamp and crash of boots as the Adjutant leaves.]

NOTES

[1] I struggled here over how to phrase this. “Negroid” is offensively close to the cluster of Spanish slave-driver words based on “black and therefore suitable for slavery” of which the worst is “the n word”.

“Blackamoor” on the other hand mocks the user, as self-mockery, for it’s pretentious and Shakespearean.

My late son told me a couple of years ago that it’s “racist” to use “Chinaman” mostly because the user sounds stupid and as if he’s about to fly to Frisco to go to China town for chop suey with his Moslem friend. So perhaps there’s a class of words that are racist-zero because they are in all cases ironic or perhaps I’m full of shit.

I shall add today’s Kant notes and other material to a new post after lunch for fading butt pain and Wan Fei-Yu (I think) on the HDTV in the day room distracts.

Quiz Time!

“fly to Frisco to go to China town for chop suey with his Moslem friend” contains how many errors: scroll down for the answer and explanations

1
2
3
4

ANSWER AND EXPLANATION

There are FOUR errors in “fly to Frisco to go to China town for chop suey with his Moslem friend”.

“Frisco” is an old-fashioned name for San Francisco and a bygone railroad (long since made a part, I believe and haven’t confirmed, of the Union Pacific).

“China Town” is no longer a proper name for a pricey zone of San Francisco: it has no name but is adjacent to North Beach. “China Town” also, somewhat incorrectly, “fronts” the noun “Town” with the noun “China”; while this is correct informally the adjective “Chinese” is available for formal and semi-formal speech and writing.

“China Town” is informal enough to sound like mockery of people who live in that district and its connotation is that the “Town” is where the Chinese are supposed to live; “Chinese town”, without the capitalization of “town”, is more neutral and its connotation is that the town is lived in by Chinese as a matter of fact.

“Chinatown” runs the slightly misused fronting adjective into “Town” making the situation worse because now, “Chinatown” becomes the only correct district people from
China should live in, they being of a different species.

My (late) son Eddie rebuked me for using “Chinatown” and “Chinaman” because both date me and sound and are, Eddie said, “stupid”.

“Chop suey” was a joke name made up by Chinese restaurant operators to fool Westerners into thinking that the day’s leavings were a sophisticated Chinese meal. In fact, Westerners, especially wealthy Westerners, are eating lower and lower down on the food chain as species (especially oceanic species) die off. It is well that they do so, and it increased the profit of restaurant owners. But it doesn’t indicate deep hipster wisdom. Only fad following.

The fad for “raw fish” in which sushi was popularized in the West in the early 1980s horrified older Westerners but as in the case of chop suey and “egg rolls”, which were popularized in urban areas in the 1950s, a public relations campaign persuaded au fait Westerners, hipsters that is of the 1950s or the 1980s, that chopped leftover vegetables, whether served steamed as in chop suey or in a roll of fried dough as in the “egg” (?) roll, was quite the cuisine that was haut (as in “oat”).

Finally, “Muslim” is so preferred today by actual members of the Islamic faith to “Moslem” that “Moslem”, altho acceptable, is considered by publishers and Muslims an error. It might piss Muslims off, so don’t use it. You don’t want to piss Moslems off. Do you.

Richard Attenborough’s films are a good guide to Indo-British pronunciation. In his film Gandhi about the life of Gandhi-Ji, the Hindus in the film during the 1948 Hindu-Muslim riots clearly scream and holler “death to Muhslims” or “death to Mooslims” and not “death to Mahslims” in a maddening way that drives Nehru, Kirpalani and even Gandhi-Ji bat shit, with the Muslim crowds (the pronunciation of their name being best captured using a u whether the sound is “uh” or “oo”) screaming “death to Hindus” or in archaic spelling, “Hindoos”, in reply, confirming that the “u” best captures the oo sound in modern English spelling. Despite the variability of the correct pronunciation the spelling has resolved around “Muslim”, not Moslim, nor Moslem, nor Muslem, nor (to cite a genuinely antique case) “Musselman”.

Change Record

7 Aug 2013: Changed adjective clear to adverb “clearly” in “clear scream and holler”
“Now” in same passage corrected to “nor”