Passe-muraille

"There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to -- if there are no doors or windows -- he walks through a wall."

Bernard Malamud, novelist and short-story writer (1914-1986)

Funeral March

Today we took a northbound train

Whose end was its beginning.

We went to one of our funerals.

Again.

We ploughed through the countryside,

Restlessly.

We was silent; out of respect, mostly.

The dawning sun threaded the haphazard mesh of the humilis and mediocris.

Eos rhododaktylos was with us.

Fogus impenetrabilis was there too.

Isabella's dead.

But she wasn't the one we was burying today.

Yet she's still dead.

The train was booming in and out of tunnels

Our ears blocked momentarily.

The night before the wake had gotten us pondering -

Alcohol does that to us,

Great disinhibitor nonwithstanding -

Ain't we vying with each other

And with-in ourselves

For the exact same thing

And for that very thing

Which makes us human?

Ya, fort und da. The rest is somewhere in between the blanks.

We also realised, putting our glasses down for the night,

That we had just acquired

A certain kind of expertise on death.

They say the devil attends every single funeral there is.

We hope he liked what he saw today.

We was an orderly, sobbing crowd,

Marching solemnly, uptight,

Aligned, with one step.

As if we was an only man.

We wept what we thought was the dead's untimely departure.

Not the dead per se.

Our kerchiefs were wet with our tears

And with the mucus from our runny nose.

Red eyes and bags underneath our eyelids.

We wrenched our hands in agony.

A discerning priest would've smelt remorse and sin a mile off.

The taste of the host was that of lemon.

Made us cringe.

A truly poorly, heartbreaking sight.

We chanted and prayed.

We lifted the spirit of the deceased as much as we lifted ours.

We knelt by the coffin. There was a hiatus there,

A hiatus waiting to be filled.

This hiatus was scarring us to death, for sure,

As it was expected,
As we was sure we was going to have to have a look
at it from the dead man's stance, at some point.

So we redoubled our chanting.

Our prayers became more sincere.

We mourned and mourned.

Cried our hearts out

for the only viable reason there ever was.

Terror does that to us.

When all was said and the deed was done,

When the last bell had rung and its echo had faded,

We went back home-home.

There we drank a full glass of scotch

Bottoms-up

And shelved the day for future use.

Combustion

"What is to give light must endure burning."

Viktor Frankl, author, neurologist and psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor (1905-1997)

Manimal

"Men are the devils of the earth and the animals are its tormented souls."

Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher (1788-1860)

Whys and wherefores

"When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist."

Helder Camara, archbishop (1909-1999)

Sartorius

"Le destin passe et repasse à travers nous, comme l'aiguille du cordonnier à travers le cuir qu'il façonne."

Amin Maalouf, Le Rocher de Tanios (1993)

Blessing in disguise

"Since my house burned down
I now own a better view
of the rising moon."


Mizuta Masahide, poet and samurai, student under Matsuo Bashō (1657-1723)

Silbo Gomero

Perpetual movement...or not.

I just love the BBC

Antarctic: Grand Canyon-sized rift 'speeding ice melt'

Hunter gatherer clue to obesity

Protected tropical forests' biodiversity 'declining'

'Land not sea' origin for snakes

Dinosaur-eating snake discovered