The pennycandystore beyond the El

 The pennycandystore beyond the El
 is where I first
                 fell in love
                             with unreality
 Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom
 of that september afternoon
 A cat upon the counter moved among
                           the licorice sticks
                and tootsie rolls
        and Oh Boy Gum

 Outside the leaves were falling as they died

 A wind had blown away the sun

 A girl ran in
 Her hair was rainy
 Her breasts were breathless in the little room

 Outside the leaves were falling
                      and they cried
                                   Too soon!  too soon!

--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The status quo takes a lot of effort and that is a bothersome thing; the bug stuck on its back, legs dangling and reaching for something.

That’s the rub; just like that bug, for some ungodly reason we are built to get stuck.

Goodness.

In the summertime, this is how you “do” Utica.

The battle against Powerpoint presentations has been won (except for the US military).  The world has recognized that bullet points are best pointed inward; anecdotes serve the narrative of a point and visuals paint better pictures than words.  The Powerpoint where glossy eyed speaker-trons read slides to an audience that already has is dead.  In its place, TED Conferences have released a new threat to the expression of complicated ideas in timely formats.

The problem is I don’t have a simple definition of this problem and so probably can’t make a compelling case against it.  Here’s a stab:

TED is homogenizing inspiration.  It is trimming the fat from the meat of the point of the thing that is complicated and selling instead the exuberance of the speaker or the energy behind the question.  What is left is of course a good thing but in concentrated batches it is becoming a pulpy grey soup of new things that are probably good and neat but indistinguishable from the rest.  Video games are a good thing! Food is an important thing! Inspiration is a good thing! TED is about ideas and ideas about communicating those ideas so why is TED selling new ideas in the same way.  It’s like asking a talented shoe salesman (I mean the best of the best shoe salesman ever) to pitch terraforming Mars.  Horrible analogy?  Yes!  Complicated points sometimes make for horrible analogies.

There are many many ways to sell an idea.  To communicate an idea.  To destroy grammar to encourage communication.  Have you ever read or heard of Heat?  It’s a food book by Bill Buford.  It’s a food book – but so are cookbooks.  But cookbooks are packaged like Powerpoint presentations.  Some publications like Cook’s Illustrated include anecdotes, histories, failed attempts and final conclusions to “season” or contextualize their recipes.  Heat takes it further than that.  The notion of eyeballing an ingredient in a recipe (use a bunch of salt, to taste) is as natural to cooking as conversational English kills proper grammar.  There is a specific way to do certain things “correctly” and then there’s the real way.  The real way cannot be broken down into palatable parts – sometimes it’s just complicated.  Buford explored the complexity of Italian food (its complexity wrapped up in deceiving simplicity) and shared his conclusions and the lessons learned and wrote a book about it.  There are recipes embedded in the narrative.  Those recipes look like paragraphs (they are paragraphs) and the point of this example is that the point of the story is not defined so easily.  Sometimes it takes time.

Lawrence Wright wrote The Looming Towers and has now turned that book (and his research into Al Qeada and other terrorist organizations) into a one-man play called “My Trip to Al Qaeda“.  The narrative is complicated.  The point of his work is available to anyone interested in the cliff notes, but Wright discovered a new layer to the story that needed expression.  The words he wrote were not enough and without a clear set of reasons, he redirected his expertise from the quantitative reality of his journalism into the foggy mushiness of a play.  It is drama it is life is is inspirational and probably other things all the same.  And more.  And it is not not not not not a lecture about what it is.  That is what TED maybe is becoming.  TED is becoming TED.

Where's the cat? Where's the cradle?

How good can TED be at sharing the best ideas on the planet when every idea is expressed in the same format?

“Aapko kya fayda hoga?”

At first I was a bit taken aback with the question. I was unsure of what was asked of me, and certainly uncertain of what to say to what I thought was being asked.

There was a definite sense of assertiveness along with a clear politeness with which the question was posed. I knew it was not meant to be rude. It was simply more candid and pertinent than I was prepared for.

“Aapko kya fayda hoga?” literally translates into: What will you benefit from it?

And the person asking me this was a nineteen-year-old young man from Agra. We were sitting in his aunt’s bedroom in a one-bedroom apartment in a mostly middle and working class neighborhood in Balkeshwar, Agra. I was there to conduct interviews for my research. My dissertation field-work on reality TV shows in India began this summer in the television studios of Mumbai but also took me to Agra to speak with viewers of reality TV shows. As I sat on the bed next to Kusum’didi (name changed) and explained the particularities of the purpose that brought me to her house and my interest in talking about her interest in television viewing, her nephew, nineteen-year-old Shankar (name changed) posed the question to me: “Aapko kya fayda hoga?”

The question hung in the air for a moment.

And then it flapped its wings and flew around the room;

lingered on the blue painted walls;

gazed at the rain stained lines of dampness seeping through and breaking the vanity of firozi (deep blue) fortifications;

glanced at the flickering television still playing in the background, though now a mute spectator of the unfolding drama in the room;

pondered the close up photographs of Kusum’didi smiling at no-one and everyone, trapped within a gold metallic picture frame with tiny white flowers around the edges;

got distracted in noticing how fair and plastic she looked with the thick layer of make up in the photograph;

and then flapped some more as it circled around the room and re-encountered Kusum’didi face (without make up and intently alive this time) patiently waiting for an answer.

The question was not asked with any malice or suspicion. It was rather innocent in fact; merely an enquiry that could help Kusum’didi and Shankar prepare for the rest of the conversation. It was to define the performance and determine how they should respond to me; what was expected from them; and how the conversation may be used/re-produced (in a film, for a television show, a radio program, or perhaps a newspaper report?). And yet what was underlined in the question was an issue of transaction – of efforts being measured against outcomes.

That was a question I was afraid to answer and my fears arose from many different corners of my being.

At the most immediate and obvious level, I was there as a post-graduate student working on a dissertation research. I did not want to raise their expectation of what might come out of the conversations; but neither did I want them to lose interest in speaking with me.

As a guest who had been welcomed with great warmth and grace, it seemed rather uncouth to cite purely selfish reasons, and yet in terms of field work it was quite simply going to be a conversation from which I was to gain more than them.

And yet, what exactly was I to gain?

It was perhaps a question I should have asked myself a long time ago.

It was also a question I had asked myself many times, though lately it seemed to have become one of those questions that are just too old, tired, redundant and eventually forgotten.

But really, what was I to gain from the fieldwork or the argument-thesis-dissertation it was meant to support?

Mujhe kya fayda hoga? I asked myself.

Why am I doing this? What will I get?

For a moment I was caught up in the performance as well. Was I to provide an explanation of my intellectual aspirations, or how I intended to contribute to the growth of knowledge and social theory? The notion of talking about intellectual commitments somehow seemed very silly, if not superficial. And that itself was not a positive reflection of what I was trying to do with the fieldwork or dissertation, to say the least.

I quickly abandoned that line of thinking.

So what will I get?

A job? A tenure track position?

In the midst of a bewildering, exhilarating and exhausting summer doing fieldwork I was frankly not sure of my professional aspirations either. Did I really want to become a professor? Was that what kept me awake at night, burning the night oil, writing, trying to write or fretting about not writing a doctoral thesis? (To be honest though, it is mostly the latter)

And even if I was to say that is the ‘fayda’ I am aiming for, it again seemed rather ridiculous to try to explain a professorial ambition as ‘fayda-mand’ or beneficial to a nineteen-year-old who had almost dropped out of school and a middle aged woman who never went to school beyond receiving a primary education.

The air-cooler was making a tremendous noise, I observed. And it was not cooling me at all though the damp air that it circulated in the room hung in the hot and humid June air and clung to my skin – as if in anticipation of some response from me.

Fayda. Quick. Think of some fayda, I told myself.

A book.

Yes, that is what this is all about.

I am writing a book.

Or to be more accurate, one-day my dissertation will be published as a book. That is my hope; my aspiration; and the ‘fayda’ that motivates me.

So I said so.

Kusum’didi nodded, more in acknowledgement of the fact that I had said something than of what I had said.

Shankar on the hand stared at me. Then he cleared his throat, and asked hesitatingly but also persistently: A book?…nahi…kya matlab?

(a book?…no…what do you mean?)

His confusion was palpable in the air; Kusum’didi too seemed unsure of what I meant.

I resorted, rather helplessly, to a pantomime act. I gestured with my hands; outlining the contours of a book; and opening an imaginary book to read it.

And then I explained: “A book, you know…jaise kitab ki dukan mei…kitab…” I did not bother finishing the sentence because it seemed so futile.

Neither of them seemed to be remotely familiar with a book. Not even the concept, let alone an actual book.

How could that be?

And then something more awkward happened.

Shankar broke the pause with a further clarification: “You mean…matlab… like… ‘The five mistakes of life’…type ka book?”

(you mean…meaning…like… ‘The five mistakes of life’ kind of book?)

In the flash of a moment I both reeled and recovered from an existential crisis that graduate students working on their dissertation must be intimately familiar with. Indeed, was the dissertation one of the top five mistakes of my life or could all of the top five mistakes of my life refer to my pursuit of writing a dissertation? Personal crisis aside, the moment struck me as particularly revelatory.

Agra, a dusty and ancient city in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, is etched in imagination as the home of Taj Mahal – the testament to eternal love and splendor. Many hapless hearts and astray souls aspire to such love and such grand expressions, all over the world. And yet, when I found myself in the city for my dissertation fieldwork I encountered aspirations of a different kind – more existential, practical, functional and transactional.

The prevailing sentiment was most prominently about defining fayda, and performing to maximize fayda.

But fayda (as I tentatively understand and seek to conceptualize in my dissertation) refers to more than a cost-benefit analysis. It is about a way of life and learning to live, imagine, anticipate, pursue and perform accordingly.

Shankar and his aunt’s question and confusion were as much about deciphering my intentions as about their preparing to answer my questions and engage in the conversations. With time I began to notice their particular interest in the formal and performative aspects of a conversation – what to say, when to pause, the language or the words to use, how to say, how to look, how to sit etcetera. In referring to a book the most accessible title that Shankar could think of also reiterated the performative aspects of life (of identifying and correcting the mistakes one is likely to make in life). His familiarity with the world of books was defined in terms of ‘how to’ books that serve a function – helping him to optimize any (life) experience; perform to his potential; clarifying the end goal and accordingly identifying the means to carry on (a conversation or life in general). Shankar’s aspirations to be considered impressive and distinct (as following conversations on his life goals, fashion sense, ability to speak English better and many other issues revealed) were defined in practical, commonsensical and handy terms. Life, for him, is about figuring out what is to be done, doing it and benefiting.

Kusum’didi on the other hand referred to books as the magazines she found in the ‘beauty parlor’ she frequented. She got haircuts, facials… “aur jo jo karwate hai” (and all those things that are done) at the salon, approximately twice a month. And during her visits she often looked through the pages of the magazines on film stars and celebrities, observing their clothes, hairstyles, make up, accessories etcetera. She referred to those magazines as books. Like Shankar, for her books were a part of a larger focus on acquiring cues about how to look, how to dress, how to apply make up, and so on. Fayda, or benefit is anticipated and calculated at each turn; and performance that will deliver oneself to the marked fayda or beneficial destination was always in attention.

Fayda (end goal) and performance (means pursued) are tied together; reiterating the connection between ends and means more than the distinction between the two.

This attention to fayda and performance became an enduring feature – recurring in different encounters, places, times and instances throughout my fieldwork – and is at the heart of my dissertation, even if the fayda of the dissertation is still unclear and aflame.

Editor’s note: Today’s poem comes from an actual reader email!

What the fuck
Is this website?

Books at Grandma’s House.

Mother Teresa looked
andlookedandlookedandlooked
For fifty years
(under the rug, inbetween the cushions of her sofa, in her sock drawer)

All of that extraterrestrial space
Just yellowed paper and candle wax
She confided
to no one in particular

***

It is important to note
That Mother Teresa

It is important to note that Mother Teresa
Left mountains of paper bundled and stacked
Fifty years in the extraterrestrial space
And that those mountains seemed like pebbles
And that this was her big secret.

They couldn’t fill the space
and t
Mother Teresa’s
Train never arrived.
(anotherwaytosayit)

Mother Teresa
Confided that
Even with her ticket and fifty years on the platform
Her train never arrived.

And so what I wanna know is this:
whaty’ll I get for my ticket?

Hell is other people (not going to the carnival you’re already avoiding).

There’s probably no bathroom here.  And if there is, it has a key and the door is on the side of the building.

This publication is dedicated to the pursuit of skills (among other less important things).  It has documented game-show hackers (pre-internet), video-game virtuosos, and race-car driving bike-riding video-game-shooting master Italians.  Each of these examples document individuals with skills that were acquired only through impossibly hard work and that have no redeeming societal value.  Why are they working so hard?

I don’t know.

I really don’t know.  Hard work is an exercise in extreme failure.  Each excruciating step in the process is planted right on the back of another attempt’s failure.  The enigma of it all is exaggerated when you consider the game-show hackers that have been previously discussed.  It is as if the concept of hard work has been narrowly defined as a 9 to 5 job in a factory; any task that does not involve that experience is considered constructive and/or worthy.  Everything else is a cliche from Office Space.  So as long as the man is working on his own project in his own way, then it is worth the extreme effort.

More to come…

Until then, what does Rakim have to say about this?

How to play Bridge in your basement rec room in August.

Waiting at a bus stop is your weakest, smallest, most ignorant (in the technical sense, not a personal stupidity sense) moments in your day.  You cede all sorts of control and information that you could use to understand the context of your wait to a process that is subjected to a variety of forces hellbent of ruining it.  Traffic, weird passengers, sick drivers, bad weather, rogue North Carolina farmers – all of them are out there ready to make you wait even longer.  The only thing you can do is stand there and hope the bus will make it.  It always does but the relief you feel when you can grab a seat on your bus is not appreciation for an efficient public transportation infrastructure; it is Stockholm Syndrome.

When you wait at a bus stop, you are waiting passively.  All of the variables in the interaction – the bus stop, the bus route, the bus number, the schedule (ha!), and finally you – are relics of an age where information required organization to be recovered.  Encyclopedias broke subjects to their elements so that an alphabet would lead you to some data.  A city would determine the most valuable routes to serve a population of commuters.  Everybody understands why these systems were originally designed and we have learned to live with the consequences.  Buses are always late; they are always clustered when they arrive; and you can’t change that.

When Slate.com asked readers to propose updates to public transportation, I proposed a solution that would change the way users wait for buses.  This realignment would revolutionize the way people relate to their public transportation.  Rather than considering buses as road-trains (fixed to a track-like bus route and schedule [ha!]), people will think of buses like livery cabs.  This is a valuable shift and one that would increase reliance on the bus system and improve mobility in a city.  My solution was called Smart Buses.

Smart Buses inverts the call/stop button on a bus.  In the old system, a rider waits at a bus stop for a specific bus to arrive.  The rider then pulls a rope to tell the bus to stop at another bus stop to depart.  In a Smart Bus system, the rider calls a bus at the initial bus stop and is picked up by a bus waiting for the call.  The Smart Bus then drops the rider off at a pre-determined destination (that was indicated at the initial call).

In this new system, the wait at a bus stop is active.  You are not waiting for a random process to notice you – you are calling for attention.  It is a shift in power and a streamlining of information.  The variables are simplified and the incentive to riding the bus is greatly improved.  Riders stuck across town can find their way to jobs anywhere in the system without depending on a limited set of bus routes.

More on this to come. (ha!)

Sylva, North Carolina

How do we square the fact that there are people in our society that find ways to work and live with skills that are even more meaningless than the most scrutinized bean-counter?  It is not enough to say that these people earn a living at these tasks.  In some respect, we should applaud their resourcefulness.  The thing that is most alarming is that people practice these skills to make themselves better.  They practice hard.

The man below spent 6 months studying the seemingly random pattern of lights on the “Press Your Luck” gameshow.  Six months of intense scrutiny and study and attention and finally he recognized 5 rotating cycles around which the blinking lights always followed.  Then he verified his theory with his pause button – able to stop the light at will in his severely cluttered livingroom.  All of this was work – work without meetings or semi-casual fridays or movies devoted to the dronery, or folk songs depicting the struggle or days on and days off.  But it was hard.  Harder still because it was different and secretive and weird.  And yet this man persisted until finally he got his chance on Press Your Luck and promptly won $100,000.

He didn’t cheat.  He worked very hard to earn his victory.  What were his incentives?  What could he have accomplished if he applied his energy and focus to more mainstream endeavors?  How could he overlook the drone-like isolation of six months worth of staring into a television’s blinking pixels – to analyze bigger blinking lights – for the slight slight chance that he might win some money.

This man’s work ethic is amazing.  As are the hand-eye coordination of the Koreans below.

The output of all this effort goes *poof* like the smoke off a firecracker.

America: View through a Friendly’s window.

A man rides a bike on rollers with no hands in a room while playing an online action video game with both hands and most of his brain. He can easily fall off his bike. The amount of brain power utilized to perform this task is incredible.

This man is a Formula One racecar driver.  This is part of his training.  Something about reflexes.

What is it for?  What could he create with that brain power and dedication?

In the end – who cares anyway?

O It’s Nice To Get Up In,the slipshod mucous kiss
of her riant belly’s fooling bore
- When The Sun Begins To(with a phrasing crease
of hot subliminal lips,as if a score
of youngest angels suddenly should stretch neat necks
just to see how always squirms
the skillful mystery of Hell)me suddenly

grips in chuckles of supreme sex.

In The Good Old Summer Time.
My gorgeous bullet in tickling intuitive flight
aches,just,simply,into,her. Thirsty
stirring. (Must be summer. Hush. Worms).

But It’s Nicer To Lie in Bed
-eh? I’m

not. Again. Hush. God. Please hold. Tight

– E.E. Cummings

Several posts on this publication have analyzed the normal everyday structure of life in the US.  The way we speak and think, the way we wait, the way we pursue goals and now the way we furnish our apartments.  Technically, and more specifically, the way I just re-arranged the furniture in my apartment.

The normal structure belies a wild, untamed, unexplainable and lonely and quiet unpredictable wilderness of bad grammar, aimless ambition, and unresolved hours.  The incredible weirdness of life – the utterly incomprehensible strangeness of the thing you are seeing or feeling or smelling right now is a controllable force.  It is a wild animal, but not a cool wild animal like a tiger; it is a normal, reasonable wild animal like a water buffalo, or a yak.  It is a boring, brutally strong, single-minded eating machine capable of clearing a field with its mindless chewing while restoring it with its profuse expulsion of shit.  But it’s too dumb to know its power.

It is a beast of burden and the thing that is probably your conscious or your soul and I don’t care if this is too big of an introduction about the interior decoration of my apartment.

The TV, the great tamer of the beast, is no longer the central focal point of my home.  It has been banished to the bedroom where it will be viewed only when demanded.  My living room is now the room within which I live.  Which does not include watching TV.  It includes other things, TBD.

This is not a post that celebrates the demise of TV in the era of Wikipedia.  I hate wikipedia and I love TV.  Especially bad primetime dramas about death and the resolution of crimes that prevent more death from happening.  These programs are the things that tamed the dumb wild animal inside me.

TV – the Empire of Television – drew the maps of my life.  It laid the highways in the wilderness that organized and neatly divided what was something that had no name or metaphor or reason. It gave a history to a place or to a thing or a to a person that didn’t need one, necessarily.  Is this too big a metaphor for interior decoration?  I don’t know – you tell me.

The boundaries that define normal have been drawn by television.  A living room has a couch and chairs that try to face each other (for, you know, conversation) as well as face the TV (in case, you know, no one’s talking).  A workday revolves around the prime time television schedule.  Even if no one is watching prime time TV the way they once did.  Dinner is eaten at or around the evening news.  Sleep occurs at or around the nightly news.   Go somewhere on this planet that has no specific concept of primetime TV and you will find yourself lost.  You will be looking for an axis point around which a day is organized.  Is today a workday or a weekend?  You will consult the TV and you will be confused.  This is the moment when you realize the strangeness underlying the thing you thought was normal.  It’s a thin line.

I crossed that thin line involuntarily.  I am trying to reorient my way around my home without this time-honored focal point.  I do not expect a meaningful transformation to occur.  I am not seeking a new level of productivity or awareness.  I simply cannot go back to unknowing the outside boundaries of TV’s map.  The outer area is bigger than the 3 hours of primetime.  It is wild, curvy, weird, boring, quiet and completely pointless.  Here’s my impression of a yak’s epiphany: “Oh Look!  More Grass!”

An everyday order belies the incredible weirdness of life.   There are phrases and words and compliments and mannerisms and womannerisms and made up words and single and double and triple entendres all like a giant raging river and it’s dammed and controlled by whatisit? our language or our God or our culture or our wommanerisms or our nationality?  I won’t even venture a guess.  But it’s controlled – only slightly, barely, as if a tiny hole would bring the whole thing crashing down.  It’s controlled and harnessed, as best as can be expected by the things we take for granted.  The power of language and ideas and conversations and arguments and confusion and boredom.  It’s all important.  This video plays with language the way today’s child plays a video game.  It’s sure-footed and quick and it comes out of a place apart – let’s call it the shore of the river that’s dammed by God.  Was that a pun?  Dammed by God.  Damned by God.  Does that even have to make sense?  Remember the river is life or truth or something I probably didn’t clarify because I never claimed to know in the first place.

The things I don’t know are probably not answers to questions.  They are things though, I can tell you that – they are items that can be quantified and probably stacked like books.  But books are filled with more things listed on pages.  Those pages are counted and numbered and then read and turned-over.  The aggregate of those things leads to less things but bigger things.  Bigger things are probably more important things; things with weight.  What is the thing of a book?

2666 is 900 pages of things that I’ve read and loved and when you ask me what is the book about? I answer back that it is probably…… probably about life – life like living, the verb part of life, the noun.  It’s a documentation of many things that are semi-related but man, they are barely semi-related.  The only thing linking them is the beating heart and blood and raging stupid sweaty hormonal thoughts of the characters involved.  God are they stupid.  God, did I love this book.  What was it about?  It’s about that god damn river.  Did we even get to the part where we wonder where the river originated and to where it leads?  Do metaphors have myths and origins?

It’s so hot, the crystal key in Jeremy Piven’s Chrysler Imperial just set fire to the back-up hair piece he keeps in

It’s so hot, the crystal key in Jeremy Piven’s Chrysler refracted the spitting image of Ricardo Montalban

It’s so hot, the Corinthian leather in Jeremy Piven’s Chrysler just drove itself back home, leaving his crystal key refracting a laser beam through his second best emergency backup hairpiece.

the Chrysler Imperial is out.  can’t figure it out yet.  Believe me, at the time in my mind when this came together, it was hilarious.  Now it’s too much.

Take 2:

It’s so hot, the boils on Larry King’s ass….. nope.  still not there.

comedy………………………….  GOLD

Everybody shut up for a second: The internet is being used to solve the world’s problems.  Let’s zoom in on that ridiculous statement to Slate.com, which recently asked its readers to propose inventive solutions to the world’s public transportation woes.  Notice that this question, which I have paraphrased and then re-phrased not as a question but as an invitation, does not target a specific public transportation mode, city, geography, state, nation, or planet.  Each of these specifications come with their own unique set of woes that a community of readers might solve with collective wit, imagination and inspiration.  My problems as a subway rider on the Boston T might differ from the complaints made by a Metro rider in DC, which would alter dramatically from the issues raised by an Earth-ferrying intra-orbital zeppelin passenger, etc.  There is a reason Slate.com generalized this topic – Slate.com lives in the cloud and clouds can’t be fenced or they won’t be fenced, or they are never fenced no matter if you try to fence them or not.  They float here and there in an ethereal fog that sharpens colors and outlines temporarily before fading away.  Slate.com is not a community.  It does not represent a locality.  It represents ideas that are written by people with editors on topics that shift like the cloud, with the cloud and in the cloud itself.  This cloud can’t be chained to a location – it can’t be tied with any specificity because it will rust or whither or it will die or you will stop going to it because your visits give it power and when it stops moving, you stop caring.  Anyway – I’m over-writing.

Slate.com can’t ask you about the T or the Metro because it doesn’t know who you are.  And if it knew who you are, then it would know where you are.  That knowledge is the thing that makes a cloud-based publication a community.  That knowledge is the thing that can be harnessed to solicit information of value from a community that is not interested solely in prize money but rather in the value that is collected by the community itself.  Because the community shares a problem that needs to be solved.

So Slate.com which may or may not succeed in solving the world’s transportation woes made me realize recently the difference between an online publication with user-accounts and comments sections and blogs and the same thing that is also an online community.  I posted a solution to transportation woes and if you were to be so kind, I ask you to please vote in favor of my smart buses solution.

– Einstein & Freud & Jack –

Death is a dead, at least that’s what Freud said.

Long considering, he finally thought

Life but a detour longer or less long;

Maybe that’s why the going gets so rough.

When Einstein wrote to ask him what he thought

Science might do for world peace, Freud wrote back:

Not much. And took the occasion to point out

That science too begins and ends in myth.

His myth was of the sons conspired together

To kill the father and share out his flesh,

Blood, power, women, and the primal guilt

Thereon entailed, which they must strive

Vainly to expiate by sacrifice,

Fixed on all generations since, of sons.

Exiled in London, a surviving Jew,

Freud died of cancer before the war began

That Einstein wrote to Roosevelt about

Advising the research be started that,

Come seven years of dying fathers, dying sons,

In general massacre would end the same.

Einstein. He said that if it were to do

Again, he’d sooner be a plumber. He

Died too. We live on sayings said in myths,

And die of them as well, or ill. That’s that,

Of making many books there is no end,

And like it saith in the book before that one,

What God wants, don’t you forget it, Jack,

Is your contrite spirit, Jack, your broken heart.

– Howard Nemerov