What of You a Cat Possesses Is Essential but Narrow

I am reading a novel (and jinxing, that's what I do) that reads (in English translation from the Spanish) like my daily Simplenote not just the diary form but how someone my age downhill on an escalator if not yet a sled tries to file and process information as fast as once when points of reference from a week ago are gone but something reminded me of x-incident in what year was that in the 80s? So fuck me for jinxing me, here's Stanley (named after Elkin) pissing in our toilet yesterday morning, forgive, I didn't have time for video and alas tinkling audio but Earthgirl can vouch

Stanley an amazingly smart cat but an irritating stalker, professing love then cutting me open, and it *might* be love but I don't love him enough to be cut open

I try to explain less than once I did, a habit I'm consciously trying to thwart

Is it me or is there more duh from people a higher digital caste than me explaining to me that our shitlords are monstrous racist sexist murderous sociopaths?

Deliberate immiseration is unfortunately eight syllables

 

This week in Federal Appellate Court
Prospects for a post-Merkel E.U. >>>	It’s summer, Brussels pretends to be on vacation, but nobody believes it: clouds are gathering, no silver lining in sight, nerves wrecked all around. Forests are burning, rain is falling, rivers are flooding – the climate crisis has hit home, more undeniably than ever. Of the €750 billion Corona ‘recovery fund’, not a single euro has yet been spent and the fourth wave is beginning to unfurl. Time for a fiscal booster shot – but how to pay for it? The French war in Africa drags on, the failed states of Libya, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon continue to fail, German demands for a European asylum regime that protects Germany from having to live up to its moral rhetoric are as divisive as ever, regime change in Russia must wait since Putin won’t resign. And now Afghanistan: Good Uncle Joe has become Bad Uncle Joe, toute l’Europe being shocked: unilateralism! In Germany and the UK, governments are desperately trying to avoid explaining why, apart from following American orders, they have been fighting a senseless war for two decades in an ungovernable faraway country. And in the midst of disaster everywhere Angela Merkel, the European Union’s unappointed but all the more effective Super-President, who they say has somehow kept it all together, is to leave her office as German chancellor this coming autumn, forever.
Bad moon		Taliban claim control of the news				Today's rhetorical question: why won't corporate media say "climate change"
Of course I'm being spied on, Jeff types into his free google blogging platform
Fothermucking Memodrats and their ardent fans
Avedon Carol's occasional links
Maggie's weekly links				{ feuilleton }'s weekly links
Genius of Love released forty years ago today
Note on the translation				What's still open in Lakeforest Mall?
It might surprise you to learn there's new Guided by Voices!

 

TO JUDGMENT: AN ASSAY

Jane Hirshfield

You change a life

as eating an artichoke changes the taste

of whatever is eaten after.

Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat—

not objectively present at all—

and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow:

to know if the distance between two things can be leapt.

The piano, that good servant,

has none of you in her at all, she lends herself

to what asks; this has been my ambition as well.

Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot

whose water comes from far-off mountain springs.

Inexhaustible, your confident pronouncements flow,

coldly delicious.

For if judgment hurts the teeth, it doesn’t mind,

not judgment. Teeth pass. Pain passes.

Judgment decrees what remains—

the serene judgments of evolution or the judgment

of a boy-king entering Persia: “Burn it,” he says,

and it burns. And if a small tear swells the corner

of one eye, it is only the smoke, it is no more to him than a beetle

fleeing the flames of the village with her six-legged children.

The biologist Haldane—in one of his tenderer moments—

judged beetles especially loved by God,

“because He had made so many.” For judgment can be tender:

I have seen you carry a fate to its end as softly as a retriever

carries the quail. Yet however much

I admire you at such moments, I cannot love you:

you are too much in me, weighing without pity your own worth.

When I have erased you from me entirely,

disrobed of your measuring adjectives,

stripped from my shoulders and hips each of your nouns,

when the world is horsefly, coal barge, and dawn the color of winter butter—

not beautiful, not cold, only the color of butter—

then perhaps I will love you. Helpless to not.

As a newborn wolf is helpless: no choice but hunt the wolf milk,

find it sweet.