How important do you think you are, among the piles of pocket Audubon's, clearly
Reduced to your actual size, you are two, hunched figures on wire-mesh armatures
Where I am, and where I am starting something you respect among your bent-back necks,
Distress calling, like the men who run past me, walking, soon walk, should their hearts fail.
Like dead people we've seen, your fondest würst's too heavy to take you, an armature
Himself in a grown-up cage, at least it allows the current through as I imagine. Somewhere true
Freedom spits, as sea spritz off a gull's wing. Without spitting into his hazel motes, should a heart fail,
I pull a valve, and sound tears from the euphonium, as well from you, his dearest mouthpiece.
Himself in a gulag and a caged dream of overcoming, somewhere he scrambles for lunch--True,
This energy of the Appetite gets away from me, and loosens my mind and legs, which are the same.
I'll let you supply The Carnival of Venice and I'll lower my mask. It is so difficult being mother, mouthpiece
The worst, I have seen dressed up as his dessert plate. Remember this twitch of evident distress
Was the very same you sent out, a sad face before which a supremacy is now cowering. The same,
With broken wings: you are multiplied among the pocket Audubon's, as if it were done yesterday, clearly
Reduced to your actual size, and unearned sophistication, warding off this twitch of evident distress
As I fly off--Where you are suppressing something you vaguely respect between your bent-back necks.
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William Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence:
"But in one could be certain of nothing in dealing with creatures so incalculable as human beings, there were explanations of Blanche Stroeve's behaviour which were at all events plausible. On the other hand, I did not understand Strickland at all. I racked my brain, but could in no way account for an action so contrary to my conception of him. It was not strange that he should so heartlessly have betrayed his friends' confidence, nor that he hesitated not at all to gratify a whim at the cost of another's misery. That was in his character. He was a man without any conception of gratitude. He had no compassion. The emotions common to most of us simply did not exist in him, and it was as absurd to blame him for not feeling them as for blaming the tiger because he is fierce and cruel. But it was the whim I could not understand.
I could not believe that Strickland had fallen in love with Blanche Stroeve. I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect, and eagerness to do good and to give pleasure--if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence" (112).
It is true, John James Audubon saw a flock of flamingos in the Florida Keys in 1832, and it took him six years to paint a dead one shipped from Cuba.
I should not speak even worse of the dead, but he was quite fond of nomenclature, and he flew down one day leaving his wedding ring, escitalopram, field guides and euphonium around the bed. Rather than immediately take my leave,
I was tainted by the deception:
would you feel better if I pack everything away so that you didn't see it? It wouldn't stop you from coming in here? It was terrible, but I felt the sense to hold out for a philosophical lesson.
The mouthpiece was hearing everything he said secondhand.
Taking the naturalistic mode, where I always find some relief, and then torturing it with wire, was a measure of the self-betrayal that I then felt.
Thankfully, I have not reprised a scene like this. It is more demoralizing than being alone.
I will reread The Moon and Sixpence (1919). Now is not the time.
Recall that Strickland leaves Blanche Stroeve, and she commits suicide. He lived a dissolute life, and he is ostracized in a leper's existence in Tahiti with Ata, a native girl.
Leprosy or tzara'at or psoriasis is an index of a spiritual malady. Humans are adept at lying to themselves. The blemish of the skin is a sign of hidden transgressions, spiritual defects, and revelations of the neuroendocrine immune network.
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