Tzadi (90). Ce n'est pas pour me jeter des fleurs
Only when a little of the coveted bounty was finally his for the asking—only when it became altogether clear how stupefyingly unsuited he was to have and to hold anything other than his art—was he inspired to write that brilliant cycle of comic parables (the stories ‘Revenge,’ ‘Lice,’ ‘Indiana,’ ‘Eppes Essen,’ and ‘Adman’) in which the tantalized hero does not move to act at all—the tiniest impulse toward amplitude or self-surrender, let alone intrigue or adventure, peremptorily extinguished by the ruling triumvirate of Sanity, Responsibility, and Self-Respect, assisted handily by their devoted underlings: the timetable, the rainstorm, the headache, the busy signal, the traffic jam, and, most loyal of all, the last-minute doubt.
—Philip Roth’s The Ghostwriter (1979)
She needed to live in small dusty rooms, layered safely in, out of reach of dizzying things, of heat and light and strange places, and Larry needed the great sheltering nave of the Agency. He believed that nothing can be finally known that involves human motive and need. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.
—Don Delillo’s Libra (1988)
Beryl Parmenter: Remake oneself that is—Into the Image that is the Greatest of Sanctuaries; and then down below, where Josef K learns its applicants were admitted with the highest grades, then there is the work from the insights ungained
From Camp Peary, The Farm (1942)—Just in the shadow of the Rockefellers’s backyard and the once traversed oyster shell paths of each inarticulate bivalve filtering remarkably 190 liters per day—The oft-quoted and irrelevant-to-our-times, H.L. Mencken deemed the Chesapeake Bay an immense protein factory (1940) serving the inner harbor endpoint and input of the dredge where the mignonette drained, the forbidden living thing composed of a minuscule heart and two-catchment adductors imitated on a porcelain plate displayed upright in E.I. Lonoff’s wife’s hutch in the Berkshires—Not for an incorporated bead-work or half-shell palate applied to undiscovered Lascaux (1940); but the diners’s discards after the slurped liquor returned by shucking house dumping wheelbarrows and successive avuda
Lost, hopeless (אֲבוּדָה) that is the feminine; when, in fact the genus is sequentially hermaphroditic with generations in flux to changing in salinities—Emerging from the brown spotting to edges of glassine and spine, Spondylus, one pours from a photographic volume of the spiny types pieced in pre-Columbian times into the double-headed serpent and the latter day color exemplars dived in the Seahorse Island, Mayotte—You remark on the inconsistency of the recoiled delicacy for kashrut, while the ground shell is an acceptable calcium supplement—Oyster shells; abstained for implications with intracoronary calcium deposition, and the disputed Agaston score preceding an adverse cardiac event even in the halest of human specimens; with particular vulnerability, due to dehydration, for athletes as the fugitive Trojan, Troilus—
Achilles ambushed, who was first written on the sixth B.C.E. Spartan aryballos, an oil flask for gymnastics and body worship anathema to Josephus’s contemporaries and critics of Hellenized materialists, and their robust cultivation of the mind and body for the spiritual drawbacks in the Olam Ha-Ba—Recorded in for the partial fulfillment and the many-undersigned explanation of the agonal gasp of the aspirated of soul-rungs read by the modern Cressida
In the Greek camp—Defending their most dedicated of plagiarists, all doomscrolling the modern philosophies as agon, a commonplace in preparation for war—The Red Calvary’s Isaak Manievich only then is afforded entry into a louse-covered bunk by stomping on a living goose’s brain (1923)—Then there is the nēnē goose of their Hawaiian Islands, where the third son, Laurance S. Rockefeller raised the Mauna Kea
Beach Hotel (1964)—Where the road sign conveys tourists and warns of citations for disturbing the banded, endangered fowl dispersing ōhelo ʻai, the native blueberry pioneering volcanic
ash—The nēnē akin to the Canadian geese, and the latter flown off course by derangements in the Earth's magnetic field, and bowed
Laurence Parmenter: Under snow, where the winter wheat’s summer harvests followed the progressive wing’s sympathies—The Agency monitors Canada’s shipping exports to the Soviets (1964)—Extrajudicial black sites where impediments to Agency plans pass from sight—You imagine assignments to these flyovers comprising in real life one percent of interminable meetings and solitary reading bowed
Beneath goose-neck lamps—After a series of unremarkable initiations, you have arrived to find the lab vacated; alone with the display of Anser anser’s skeleton well-suited for comparative anatomy with the smallest scleral ring and recured beak teeth—Just as you had always desired seeing it without the desensitizing purchase of hope—As Lady and I look out tonight; we sit with that recording from Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, and is the last of the set of Desolation Row (28 August 1965)—Picking up those observations made by von Frisch, Lorenz, and Tinbergen of each life’s work and one-third share in the Nobel Prize for Physiology (1973)—Outlaying the working of the way you capably clear the dining table and the greylag’s fixed action pattern of nest egg or golf ball endlessly retrieved—Through the failing beams of literary history, as Cressida averred of her unkind self that itself will leave / To be another’s fool (III.2.149-150)—Encouraged by the amateurish methods of physicist and Soviet sympathizer, Klaus Fuchs (1942), one of the British contingencies to the Manhattan Project—Codenamed Raymond; he speaks to Sonya née Ursula Beurton and Gus; Russian for goose, which is the alias of Harry Gold, and the last who testified at the trial of the Rosenbergs for a thirty-year plea (March 1951)—The Raymond-Sonya-Gus party line is intercepted by the Lee County chicken farm heiress and cryptanalyst, Gene Grabeel, who sifts intercepted Soviet communiques with the repeated encryption keys for Project Venona (1943-1978)—Gene, whose ardor was perhaps cooled by the human capacity for deception, remains ungained
In marriage; similarly to her colleagues of the Signal Intelligence Agency—In spite of this; awakened by the contracted snowplow to excavate our stretch of private road up the orchard, we take our turbulent flight to Mauna Kea—
That clambering drive up the arid summits toward thirteen telescopes; below, everything else between us illegitimate including the panorama of the son’s bay retreat of then the most expensive hotel at fifteen million (1962), and the realized version of the Standard Oil magnate—
John D. Rockefeller celebrated every 26th of September as the venerated day he became assistant bookkeeper at Hewitt & Tuttle (1855), and he thought fondly of this sixteenth-year-old; self-taught factotum, crediting all his gains to the close reading of the balance sheet—The year Robert Moses secures the eminent domain for the Lincoln Center, a physicist opts for the respective promontory of the shield of Mauna Loa—Driven by and
underwritten by estimates of the air’s gaseous contents; for those who could not foresee the many rostrums mounted for this company line—Toward the much-implicated, if improvised, Keeling Curve (29 March 1958) across from the Everest-overreaching summit of deep space-attuned lenses of Mauna Kea
Observatory (10,200 meters) with Martian terrain owing to the understated vagaries of atmospheric conditions where the preponderance of ash forces data collection to pause for the eruption (28 November 2022)—Many stake their careers on these aerosols only to find
an interrupted esteem, Mine honor keeps the weather of my fate (V.2.29)—Ransomed from freefall while test-flying the Lockheed U2-B insufficiently high over Soviet airspace (1 May 1960), Francis Gary Powers in his Bell 206 helicopter crash lands stateside following a lead with the videographer narrowly off course—If not, for the forecasted avuda
The shame of colliding with an occupied baseball diamond to capture a Los Angeles wildfire for KNBC primetime due to a near-empty fuel tank (1 August 1977)—Settled in a clean, well-lit place, you and I debate how it is with a heavy dusting of sand when Cressida
Steps into the Greek camp, where she is obliged to kill all the compatriots of Ulysses fearing much worse—Her soon-to-due brother, Hector, disturbed more by the evidently feminine caprices contained in the courtesy of a sleeve as tribute; self-determination, instead of his sister ravished in Calchas’s tent—Lee Oswald’s Marina felt akin to this, walking the air-conditioned aisles of Montgomery Wards—After the American exhibit of a kitchen in Sokolniki Park (24 July 1959), she recalled that particular photograph of the prominently displaced box of soap-infused steel wool of S.O.S.—Contained in those catalogs Lee perused before settling on an Italian mail-order with a compound name, Mannlicher-Carcano; since then, mislaid from the National Archives, which the section supervisor maintains was the weapon in Abraham Zapruder’s frames (22 November 1962), with the first shot the most accurate with a moving target—That is approved; if coerced answer, submitted by the Agency Troilus
Beryl Parmenter: As you say; therein, The fractions of her faith, the orts of her love, (V, 2, 154)
Speaking as the paralyzed Prince of Troy, Troilus
In the photograph, three-days pancreatectomized (18 November 1922), Charles Best’s border collie is Marjorie (Dog 33) and her sisters, bowed
Before her vivisector; and his supervisor, the later acclaimed Sir Frederick Banting (1943)—The fable of insulin began in the experimental barn of the University of Toronto with its subjects injected with purified fetal calf protein—Perhaps, owing to the diminishing supplies, the subject’s injection site abscesses, and the increasing grumblings for attribution; Marjorie or her substitute is chloroformed (27 January 1922)—So often, the perpetrator recalls his ahava avuda lost love, whose material requirements the Greek aggression over the wraith of Helen confound, Cressida—
In the Fifties, Jan Oort furthered our grasp over the periodic comet band in space with radio astronomy after the work of Ernst Öpik at the Armagh Observatory (1932)—To settle on the chalk-dust renderings of that 2000-21000 AU repository of planetesimals that regularly perturb the Solar System; and then ort, hay rime, which the end-note clarifies refuse the cattle won’t touch—Hearing this, just as there are 50 Words for Snow (2011), briser la glace, briser le coeur as the November drizzle falls on that morning—On the Warren Commission dissenter, the red-raincoated Jean Hill (1964), who had survived accidents that befell the other eyewitnesses—She recalls the Latin in her backward Oklahoma upbringing; Jean Hill, who followed her now-separated Bill there, to Dallas (1962) for her consulting work with Science Research Associates (SRA); he too, she capable of injecting toward a cure—On that day; auspicious, that word is the Greek augury for the birds flew well, in the early robins in that grassy knoll plumb for worms—Flurried arbrofroth on the elms during a transient cold front the Sun at midday dried to enhance the optics of those identified as three tramps in a CIA stakeout named A, B, and C by the Rockefeller Commission (1975), while their overall involvement and clarity to the Kennedy assassination remains ungained—
But for stirrings of the depatterning experiments of MK/Ultra, and then Midnight Climax case studies of bystanders under the Truth drug—Another name for snow, sky-sift, tested on passersby in metro areas by Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents like George Hunter White, whose West Coast activity included planting the heroin kit in Billy Holiday’s litter in the Mark Twain Hotel (22 January 1949)—National coverage of the San Francisco tour in the hushed set of that song by the Bronx schoolteacher, Abel Meerpol, Strange Fruit (1937)—Feebly; penciling at her desk, Jean Hill, marks papers beyond the celestial scurf of frozen rain outside the Southwest Metroplex (1972)—Her role is unavailing then eroding standards of public education; unchanged, in a downward trend since the founding of U.S. Department of Education (17 October 1979)—Out from the second husband and patriarch’s sudden collapse mowing the summer lawn, the impetus for Marguerite and youngest son Lee Oswald to sojourn from Dallas to 325 East 92nd Street, Brooklyn, where they reside eighteen months (1952-54)—On one occasion, she made Lee go in with her to that plain front Greenwich speakeasy, Chumley’s; frequented by an aspiring journalist and government narc, codename, Morgan Hall, where they are still selling hooch in teacups—What of the mystery that dispatches us to the sand trap hail he made his caddies sweep each time; the repaid dime for each lost ball of Rockefeller Senior, who traded his much-loved game of quoits for this Lakewood, New Jersey resort game of golf (1899)—He witnessed in this sixth decade, then 1902, which garnered only 58 million in investments, and cause more liable for tears—Unbearable, that amount not set to work; more so than broadcasts of that already forsaken grandson, Michael Rockefeller, on a fool’s errand in Dutch Guinea (19 November 1961)—Senior Rockefeller sustains the work of Ormond Beach Gardens; instead of taking the extended trip to the islands and cope with the Kona low, which supplies the hau of the north rim of Moku‘Āweoweo—The avuda of a Rockefeller heir eaten by cannibals or drowning from his capsized bao, and declared dead the year Mauna Kea
Laurence Parmenter: Golf Course opens (1964), which adhered to forbidden guestroom televisions until 1995—After taking in the additive albedo on the dormant shield volcano and the umbilicus of the Hawaiians, Maunakea
Rising 9,750 meters above the ocean floor, and beyond 40 percent of Earth’s atmosphere with its few unseeped meters of Lake Waiau—Forgoing the performance of a round of golf, thoughts turn to taking in a putative Black Sea exile, indoors—Paul Celan on Mangalia, the inheritance of Ovid, where he writes on his Pontic erstwhile (1947) through carmen et error, a poem and an error (Tristia 2.207)—Roman citizens saw themselves satirized in Ars Amatoria (2 C.E.); stark naked and cellulite-spoiled, and depicted worse than animals in their games, Augustus decides for peace, and Ovid must go (8 C.E.)—Threat of being put out of job remains, if to broach the incredulity of the account—Another town crier under a darkened lamppost unwelcomed to bear out the anachronism of Bic pen ink (1945); made first, by her father, Otto Frank—In the preface, he admits that his daughter’s diary (1942-44) contains mostly her words with improvements in the 1947 definitive edition haunting facsimiles under Plexiglas, stage sets and adaptions—But for all these variances, waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy (III.2.186); and careworn, the constant man, Troilus (III.2.201)—
So then of the Celan, Ashglory (1947) for the incorruptible dust (afar) respired, and a descent by a Pyrrhonist into avuda
Jacques Derrida states of the poem, Aschen-glorie stands beyond the historical referents of the witness, which is the greatest compliment and offence—Implying that it could be ghostwritten by anybody else: No one / bears the witness for the / witness (lines 24-26)—Of the Zuckerman family shame in a short story read in the Great Man’s living room, and retiring E.I. Lonoff’s praise for the work; first-class to being a third lister on a strip mall rental space—Once a year, we retreat to the exception among million-dollar listings wound with public beach accesses; their broken bottles interlaced golden mallows, where cesspools overflow abundantly, here too, in this island paradise—Pontus Euxinus, the inhospitable sea (Πόντος Εὔξεινος) enriched by the steppe chernozem runoff that once made a black market for Ukranian soil; not now, with fragments of Kh-101 cruise missiles like the one that bowed
The children’s hospital (8 July 2024) with chip serial numbers traced to Intel and Texas instruments—Apt to mention the novel, Elizabeth Hardwick, who had read the devastating drafts of her ex-husband, Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin (1976-7) of the discarded woman, whether on Marlborough Street of Soho or Dublin; wherever he left her—The not-then thirty-eight-year-old Guinness heiress of the Freud portrait, Girl in Bed (1952)—Hardwick had this to say of the NYRD review of The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), and portrait of a Cressida
Beryl Parmenter: And Troilus Romance, the rules it had made the human collisions that are, finally, our biographies (14 June 1973)—This line revisited in Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (2022); prefaced with George Bataille, an atheist—Trying to understand this with a fashionable abomination in the Greek manner of Yavan (יָוָן), which is Tzion (צִיּוֹן); and a sign and a landmark, without the bent-double path of tzadi (צ)—Cressida’s
Homeland where the pyres went out and the Eigengrau of waking without electricity that inspired Pierre Soulages, the black painting artist—The first living artist exhibited in the Hermitage and the Tretyakov (2001), in good company with Malevich’s crazed Black Square (1915)—The tropical high-altitude permafrost within a Pacific archipelago, and the forthcoming ordeal of our hike that stopped at a pool freezing overnight—Here and there, the otherworldly hand-pollinated silverswords (Argyroxiphium sandwicense)—Soulages realized the poverty of his palette, then the light reflected from the black, and then the canvases of Outrenoirs (1986-2018), such were the sights along the Goodrich pass taken at night (1832), and the subsequent trampling on the sacred mountain for the arrays of Mauna Kea—
Visualizing our bit-part of the galaxy in the Laniakea Supercluster (LSC) with the neutro-backscattered suggestion of the Delphinus Void, which Lowell would smile at the suggestion of stellar nucleosynthesis—From The Dolphin, [...] drawn through his maze of iron composition (line 3)—With iron being the heaviest element forged by normal fusion processes and the radioactive elements respun by supernovae—Phonating many millisieverts per hours of bagged gray sand in the flood basement of the Jupiter Factory in Pripyat, which were placed there for research—After the graphite-tipped control rods displaced water in the fourth reactor, which caused a power surge; not the intended shut-off (26 April 1986)—Turn to the page of Polidori’s Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl (2003); particularly, the blue-green algal glow of a peeling classroom with a lava red chalkboard with the scrawl of the last
lecture—Did the thought occur to the psychiatrist; entering the prophetic mode, which got him dropped from his Macmillan publisher, after he studied for one year at Michel de Nostredame’s Montpellier (1912-1913)—Immanuel Velikovsky suggested in Worlds in Collision (1950) the theory; found later to be plausible, which posits the destruction of Sedom and Amora by the Hidden Hand discomposing an orbit of Jupiter or other gas giant, and the ricochet of an asteroid out from the Oort Cloud—For the psychiatrist, an ungained
Academic reception, and an episode subsequently derided as the Velikovsky Affair—The issues taken up again by the most cited theoretical theorist, Lisa Randall, whose proofs of Matter as a Trigger for Periodic Comet Impacts (2014) undergirded the popular science book, Dinosaurs and Dark Matter (2015)—The gravitational binding energy of the System determines the course; the radical pairs of avian magnetoreception, where a blue photon of light triggers the protein, flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD) embedded in the retinal gold layer—Back to the ground; the sensing cryptochromes of the eye coupled with magnetite receptors in the beak, and transmitted to the brain by the trigeminal ganglion—The anatomist contemplates these systems of mechanoreception, the touch-sensitive foraging geese and ducks versus the visually foraging jungle fowl—Aloft the disk embedded in the Milky Way, and subject to the anomalies of the gravitational field; the Shakespeare play makes much use of [a]nother part of the field before unspooling dialog, as is the refrain were the Myrmidons—Oswald, with bus ticket in hand, had not managed to get to the Dallas Executive Airport (2002), which is coded still as Redbird Airport (KRBD), where June/Jerrie Cobb chartered the takeoff (22 November 1963)—She, who would neither confirm nor deny her participation to Haverstick (2023), only that it was a zero fail mission—Flying all those humanitarian missions to South America, the pilot became emboldened, and just the length of runway required and the obstacles cleared for takeoff—The most visited sites of the Moon Trees germinated from the two thousand seedlings exposed to the vacuum of space when the canister exploded in cargo during the Apollo 14 descent (9 February 1971)—Each time the pilot bowed
Below the tree line between one plane and the next; first, as QJWIN in Cuba and Leopoldville (1961-1962), and next as one of the contract employees of the Agency—Among their number of dismissed candidates of Mercury 13, and not this country’s Valentina Tereshova on Vostok 6, whose call signal was Seagull or Chaika (16 June 1963); later, conferred upon an asteroid (1671 Chaika)—Avudim
Laurence Parmenter: The plural of the disconsolate, the shamed ones or avudot—
Consider the Egyptian son of Shulamit, the daughter of Dibri of the tribe of Dan (Vayikra 24:12 who could not camp under their standard; though they were the last of the shevatim, and the collector of lost things—What is more salient to you, is not the prince displaced Cressida’s
Affections by expediency or by Greek ransom; but realization in the play and Emor (Speak) that the speech act as dealing death—Consider the bowed
Hector in the armor of Achilles; an anatomist would be quick to point out that a hit in the sternoclavicular joint, the only joint holding his sword arm to his body, and in the Greek pastiche of Shakespeare, It is decreed that Hector must die (V,7.8)—If the Shulamit’s son was not called the Egyptian; then only the dormant potential to blaspheme, and another guilt would not have preceded digressions in the wilderness—Forgoing the implications that adamah (אדמה) is the blood (dam) and bloodline contained in the feminine ground—Ascending up this mountain of a heart-to-heart toward the Keck Observatory with the receiver’s ear to the periodic radiowaves of fast radio bursts (FSBs) or pulsars ejected from neutron stars, which were first characterized by then undergraduate, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell (23 November 1967) on the summit of Mauna Kea—
If allowing this, this once: the Augustan image of the butterfly-crab pairing, festina lente, to make haste slowly, as a collective sign and measured with this knot five-finger tied (V.2.186)—For another consistent fast radio burst recognized most recently from the Crab Nebula, Messier Object One (M1) that issues constantly from the cosmic background, with the recording of Arvo Pärt (1986) for string orchestra and harp, Festina Lente—The one whom you prosecute as the golden son, Troilus
You remind that it is Pandarus who gets the last word, about the galled goose of Winchester (V.11.45), a species known from the stews operated there only by the corrupt Bishop of that seat—Known by the preponderance of venereal disease, which would have been instantly recognized by contemporaries, taken between those birds by both the gain and ungained
In endowments—Onto the fourth decade, and an envoi first brought about by the possibilities of farm implements and rutabagas in a landscape (1966)—Drifts to the ungained service, avodah, submitted every day by these no-one-in-particulars, and depicted by that Barbizon painter, Jean-François Millet, whose painting in the Orsay was entitled first, Prayer for the Potato Crop (1857)—
The bowed couple between a wickerwork pannier that conceals the child’s casket impressionable to the profane Dalí as a schoolchild studying it in passing, and determined that the crate was there, under the coats of gesso—Subject of the pain revisited between canvasses who immeasurable depths suggest the topographic dry prominence of Mauna Kea, if neglecting the other five volcanoes, from the island that conceals beneath the question of whom is Troilus and Cressida—
