La question (torture) est, comme art de découvrir la vérité, une niaiserie barbare ; c'est l'application d'un moyen matériel à un but spirituel.
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"[...]a vessel cleaving the dungeon of the waves[...]"
You're Love in the Time of Cholera!
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Like Odysseus in a work of Homer, you demonstrate undying loyalty by
sleeping with as many people as you possibly can. But in your heart you never give
consent! This creates a strange quandary of what love really means to you. On the
one hand, you've loved the same person your whole life, but on the other, your actions
barely speak to this fact. Whatever you do, stick to bottled water. The other stuff
could get you killed.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
Never miss a word
You're Infinite Jest!
by David Foster Wallace
While you1 consider yourself2 to be clever,
there are those3 who think you're just full of yourself or, perhaps worse,
playing a joke4 on everyone around you, and yet you are pretty sure that
you really are that brilliant after all, since people would hardly take the time to
get to know you5 if they didn't care very deeply about what you had to
say to them, to wit, about their lives, their hopes, their dreams, their fears, their
drug habits, and of course what videos6 they prefer to watch, since,
after all, your impressive vocabulary and tendency to go on and on7 makes
you seem superior, able to educate them, and really drive a sense of something
ineffable into their measly little skulls while you are not above making a cheap
gag or really going after anyone or anything or telling them about incredible
futures involving tennis, geopolitics, and
1Meaning you personally, not someone like you or your own
personal daddy, for example.
2As well as you can see yourself, which, frankly, may not be that well.
3Though we wouldn't deign to be so peripatetic as to name them here, mind.
4Jokes, though not common in Victorian England, were known to originate
sometime in ancient history, perhaps as early as the time of Babylon, or even before.
It is thought that the history of the joke plays an integral role in the mindset of
the characters depicted here, though you may disagree at this point, in which case I
am facing quite the dilemma in relaying this narrative, no?
5It is rather time consuming, after all.
6Ha!
7and on and on and on...
Take the Book Quiz II
at the Blue Pyramid.
You're The Metamorphosis!
by Franz Kafka
Though you think you're in the midst of a dream, the fact of the
matter is that your life has become a nightmare. The nightmare at first seems
horrific to you, but you are slowly able to adjust to the facts of the matter
and settle down and make do with what you've been given. There are those that
would say you're pointless and absurd, but you're really just trying to
demonstrate that people can (and do) adapt to anything, no matter how absurd
it is. Not that this will really inspire them to change, because they probably
don't understand.
Take the Book Quiz II
at the Blue Pyramid.
About Me
- Σφιγξ
- possesses wholly unmerited academic pretensions; examines love as an entomologist; collects haunted dollshouses; notes the lunar phase as regularly as the temperature; peruses field guides; reads like a serial magazine subscriptionist; functions through coffee and "mood" music; draws to the very corners of the page; takes notes on unlined paper; reads poetry as prayer; observes textual authority with the incredulity of fiction; suppresses the smart-ass answer(s); adapts as well as anyone beseiged by her own bibelots; she is a sensation seeker in spite of all of this.
11 comments:
From Ivan Solotaroff's The Last Face You'll Ever See: The Culture of Death Row:
"If 'the hangman's scaffold concentrates the mind,' the gas chamber has a way of bewitching it. It's smaller than one would think, roughly four feet square and ten feet high. Almost beautiful, if one is mechanically inclined, it's also extremely alien looking, like an antique, six-sided diving bell someone painted gray, slathered with petroleum jelly, and jammed into a metal wall that divides two of the three rooms that form the death house.
Waist-high windows, tinted green and reinforced internally with thin wire, are embedded with large rivets in five of the chamber's six sides. At first sight, these windows make it seem harmless. Windows are hard are to associate with death. Then the mind makes the obvious leap: this place is not for killing but for offering death as a spectacle. Three windows look out from the rear half of the chamber onto the witnesses' room, where media people, state officials, lawyers, and families of the victims sit on long wooden benches that resemble church pews. A fourth window, on the right side of the chamber's front half, is for the two doctors who monitor the condemned heartbeat on an EKG machine and a stethoscope. The fifth, to the left of the chamber's 300-pound door, is for the executioner.
The door itself makes the chamber seem very a final destination. A meld of half-moon, concave pieces of ribbed steel, it sits on the left side of the chamber's mouth on a half-inch dead-bolt hinge running through four immense casings, which allow no slack or settling that would disturb the trueness of its fit. The oval doorway, which stands just under six feet, is rimmed with a rubber gasket caked with a heavy coating of Vaseline, to prevent any cracking of the rubber that would allow gas to escape the seal formed when the chamber is shut. A large submarine style wheel on the door's right is turned clockwise, several times, to secure the seal. The wheel is so heavily oiled it makes no sound as it's turned. What one hears instead is the oily slurp of the oval gasket gripping the door's edge in the jamb, then a loud whirring as a small, squirrel-caged fan in which the gas rises evenly. A heavy fizz of sulfuric acid, freshly mixed with distilled water, comes seconds later, welling through plumbing in a room below, followed by a heavy metallic noise as the executioner drops the lever--it sounds like a silo door opening--and a plop, as a pound of cyanide salts hits the sulfuric acid bath below the chair.
There's a handsome brown wooden cross on the wall to the left as you enter, a bare hundred-watt lightbulb in a metal cage above it, and waist-high nooks in the three rear corners, which hold beakers that look like the votive candles one sees in Eastern Orthodox churches. The beakers are filled with an acetone-based solution of phenolphthalein, a liquid that will turn scarlet when the chamber's internal pH is greater than eight, indicating the poisonous gas has been neutralized with chlorides after asphyxiations, and the chamber is safe for the living to enter" (56-57).
When I was juxtaposing these two items, I thought this devastatingly well-written description is an apt metaphor for a state of temporary self-exile, or claustrophobia, only extreme insecurity can conjure. This particular instance, I recall choosing a losing relationship, where each person in a triangle freely takes a turn ensnaring the other parties, and it took quite some time to neutralize.
I realize that this post is rather intense, but I keep it to remind myself, to avoid those conditions.
http://vimeo.com/61341838
Exercise 91.
Neilah means "closing the gates."
Rather than submitting requests or feeling aggrieved, and wanting redress, one should take the time to consider how all one's choices lead to this reckoning. That one lives with comforting illusions that eclipse the greater point of life. Being apportioned another year of life, the resolution is not misspend it. I do not understand what you want from me, and I am periodically awakened to the fact that you yourself do not know.
There is the relentless back and forth of clarity and confusion.
I know what I will not start this year: another pointless degree.
There is no point in trying to get ahead in my current profession with a master's degree. Writing an essay a week and completing a clinical rotation with a manager to confer the degree would not be difficult for me; although, my heart is not in it. I am regularly put in a position of leadership and I train new nurses every shift, so I try to set a good example. I am grateful for the portability of my degree (I can go anywhere and figure it out), and the remuneration I receive from this stage in my career. The answer is a terminal "no" when I ask myself, over and over, again, if this is what I should be doing.
I am not complacent about my intellectual growth, yet the answer is not clear to me. I have to be open to receive the answer, the Binah, the Understanding, to read what is there. Without acknowledging the needs of one's soul, there is no current progress.
https://youtu.be/_FK6UttWUOA?si=Lk_LR069Xag64th-&t=4000
https://youtu.be/X77c0K7lKQY?si=tC_YmT99oRjPb-Z-&t=889
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_MacIntosh,_My_Darling#/media/File:Marguerite_Young,_Miss_MacIntosh,_cover.jpg
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Doctors/hVePdRGsX2sC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Doctors%20Nuland%20Vesalius%20%22While%20out%20walking%2C%20looking%20for%20bones%22&pg=PA74&printsec=frontcover
https://www.almanac.com/raising-chickens-101-when-chickens-stop-laying-eggs
The Light in many nights belief and doubt.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/850_Intriguing_Questions_about_Judaism/QyX-CQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=ner%20tamid%20light&pg=PA165&printsec=frontcover
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AsA4BY25Ql_1m3iQ0ECS7GC9LsQZ?e=AzPAGz
*The nights of belief and doubt. Yes.
ANOTHER KINKED CHEST TUBE AND EVOLVING SUBCUTANEOUS EMPHYSEMA.
"The retrospective review by Platnick et al36 found that certain risk factors, such as chest tube placement in the emergency department, placement by emergency medicine clinicians, and placement in patients with a body mass index greater than 30 were all associated with chest tube complications. However, the exact complication rate associated with chest tubes is variable and has been quoted as high as 40%."
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/2788397
I had an LVAD with colorectal cancer on a continuous infusion of 5-fluorouracil. I am not certified to administer it, but to keep it infusing and mop up the effects. The body fluids contaminated with it are isolated. One should avoid breathing it.
"Mechanistically, 5-FU exerts its effect through incorporating the active metabolites into nucleic acids directly, or inhibiting thymidylate synthase to disrupt the function of DNA and RNA, leading to profound effects on cellular metabolism and viability."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9884763/
https://www.newyorklife.com/articles/single-living-on-one-income
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/07/03/on-average-older-adults-spend-over-half-their-waking-hours-alone/
https://www.sefaria.org/Leviticus.26.45?lang=bi&aliyot=0
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