I've got a surplus of whale blubber.
If you can decipher the following I will hand deliver you eight spoonfuls of sugar and a crate of whale blubber, pending availability:
Summit. Tree. Swastika. Morning after the roses rules.
Dali is not a Salivdor Lama--
These things I know NOT to be correct:
Cheerleader pants and sunglass dreams underneath a jackolantern hung
aloft
verily.
Best interpretation gets the blubber, man.
(That'll do pig, that'll do.)
Slopped by
sarcasmus
at
11:55 AM
“…it’s hard to resist your own substance, you’d like to stop all this, give yourself time to think about it and listen without difficulty to your heartbeat, but it’s too late for that. This thing can never stop. This enormous steel box is on a collision course; we, inside it, are whirling madly with the machines and the Earth. All together, along with the thousands of little wheels and hammers that never strike at the same time, that make noises which shatter one another, some so violent that they release a kind of silence around them, which makes you feel a little better. You give into noise as you give in to war. As the machines you let yourself go with the two three ideas that are wobbling about at the top of your head. And that’s the end. From then on everything you look at, everything you touch is hard. And everything you still manage to remember more or less becomes as rigid as iron and loses its savor in your thoughts.” Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
“It’s not that I like the empire—I hate it—but there’s nothing I can do about it right now.” Luke Skywalker, Star Wars
5 comments:
Some believe The Tree of the Knowledge of Good Evil was in the shape of swastika, which, as you know, was formerly considered a symbol of strength--also related to the shape of the mandala, being a symbol of spirituality and cyclicality.
The place where the Tree was located (its location only obscurely referenced in Genesis) is sometimes referred to as the "One Tree Hill" (you'll notice U2 had a song on The Joshua Tree by this name, which mentions "crooked crosses," a metaphor again for the tree and also the mandala). Many people argue over whether the One Tree Hill refers to Eden or Golgotha, but I believe this argument is pointless--as one refers to the other in a kaleidoscopic symbol-loop; one is not sure which is the object, which the referent.
Now, the roses are a little more of a reach, but I believe that at the Dali Museum in Luerges (Dali's childhood town in Cataluna), I saw some early sketches of Dali's interpretation of The Fall. I believe he had drawn roses in a garland around the Tree that looked a bit like female genitalia. "Dali is not a Salvador Lama"--again, an oblique reference to the mandala. I believe the writer is critiquing Dali and the painter's suggestion that objectification of the female body is woman's punishment for bringing about The Fall. (Thus, the cheerleader skirts.)
The jack-o-lantern face is suggestive of the Old Man, the devil himself, originally evoked (in squash form) by early Christians to ward off evil spirits (I always find that so paradoxical, yet beautiful--call on bad spirits to scare off bad spirits. Like the way rangers use fire to stop forest fire). These jack-o-lanterns were hung beside the early Christians' doors, where their lamps were usually set--of course, on All Hallows Eve and various other times throughout the year. They found this pratice, by the way, to simultaneously shore up their courage against the unknown and also instill the fear of the unknown in their children. The sunglasses the poet mentions, I would guess, are a way to block out the light of this nocturnal bugaboo, or rather the dream of it: the fantasy that one can escape evil in this world--through a variety of means, specifically through the pursuit of sex, "skirt-chasing," as this poet might call it (carnal knowledge, again represented by the tree).
Over all, I believe the writer is encouraging us to walk that impossibly thin line between knowledge and oblivion. He points out that the struggle is not, as so many people have declared over the years, between good and evil--that is merely a boogeyman story to keep us up at night, something made to scare the younger generations straight. The real struggle is between recognition and ignorance. Awareness or daydream. Such a nuanced theme beneath such a well-crafted exterior is what makes this piece such an absolute success.
By the way, where did you find one of my poems?
Christ almighty, I daren't think you'll be beat. I better start packing my blubber!
anyone here got a masters degree?
pppft. Masters. That'll get you somewhere. RIGHT. ggggffffbbblllub
um, I think the author maybe spilled some fridge magnets?
Alright, truth is, I just really want the blubber. Well, actually just the satisfaction of having it hand delivered. Where my neighbors could see.
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