by Maniza Naqvi
Our First Expatriate President
by James McGirk
Mr. Obama spent his formative years as an outsider and that estrangement shaped his view of the United States in a profound way. At school he was peculiar, he had lived overseas and was a jangled mixture of races and cultures. His father was Kenyan, his stepfather was Indonesian and his mother was a Caucasian expatriate academic. And Hawaii, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, was more like a forward operating base or an embassy than a state. Men and material were flowing through it en route to Vietnam and the federal government had a far more pervasive and sinister presence in Hawaii than it did elsewhere. The United States wasn’t a fundamental part of himself – not in the unambiguous, automatic way it would be for someone born in Detroit, Michigan – rather his sense of belonging to the United States was something that had to be negotiated.
My early life was equally jangled. My parents were journalists and my grandfather was a petroleum prospector for Texaco, which meant that our family was estranged from the United States for more than 70 years. Growing up, the U.S. was a highly abstract concept that was paradoxically close and accessible to me. My information about the country came from mostly headline news, and was highly polarized; this was the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and more often than not the news contained tales of the tape comparing the United States with the Soviet arsenals. What little of I saw of the real U.S. came in brief glimpses during visits to embassies or when we visited relatives in Southern California. In comparison to the bleakness of the United Kingdom, Spain and India, the U.S. was a technologically advanced paradise where everyone looked and sounded the way I did.
Happy 60th Birthday to 3QD friend David Byrne
by S. Abbas Raza
Last year I did some songs for a film by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino (check out his previous film Il Divo). This new film, This Must Be The Place, stars Sean Penn as a kind of present-day Robert Smith (The Cure). I wrote the music, Will Oldham wrote the lyrics and Michael Brunnock sang the songs. In the film, these songs appear on a demo CD that the Sean Penn character is handed. Now, the “Italian Academy Awards” have awarded us for best score and best original song!
If you want to get it, the soundtrack is available now on Amazon and iTunes and for people in the UK, there is also a vinyl collectors edition available.
I constantly listen to David's collaboration with Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, and you can hear it too, here.
Five years ago I wrote about the amazing experience of seeing David perform live at Carnegie Hall. You can read that here.
We hope that David will continue to enrich our lives in his particular and quirky ways for decades more to come!
[Photo from last.fm.]
Monday, May 7, 2012
Summer, Mangoes, Birds, Bombay — Disjecta Membra
by Gautam Pemmaraju
The hot summer months of April and May allow for some indolence. Slack jawed, enervated street dogs, seem somehow to be the most suffering. If their parched tongues say it all, their blinking eyes, bereft of the sharp darting aggression of cooler nights, seem to offer urgent supplication. In part alleviation, they sleep through whole afternoons in the reasonable comfort of a shady spot, on occassion lifting up their heat-stricken heads to cast a listless, impecunious glance at the fools who walk the hot streets.
Offering vivid descriptions of city life, the hustle-bustle, street hawkers and dwellers, SM Edwardes, in By-Ways Of Bombay (1912), writes,
During the hot months of the year the closeness of the rooms and the attacks of mosquitoes force many a respectable householder to shoulder his bedding and join the great army of street-sleepers, who crowd the footpaths and open spaces like shrouded corpses. All sorts and conditions of men thus take their night's rest beneath the moon,–Rangaris, Kasais, bakers, beggars, wanderers, and artisans,–the householder taking up a small position on the flags near his house, the younger and unmarried men wandering further afield to the nearest open space, but all lying with their head towards the north for fear of the anger of the Kutb or Pole star.
In Sleepy Sketches (1877), the diarist, troubled by the ‘endless accounts’ of Englishmen of privilege and high office, which he finds to ill represent the reality of Bombay life (and life in Bombay), sets out to correct some. Asserting quite vigorously at the outset that the native has ‘no prejudice either in favour of truth or falsehood’ and that they cannot but help mixing the two, he finds issue with “hot glare of the sun and constant heat”, which to his mind “destroy the mystery of life and lead one to look on death as the end of all things” [sic]. The climate threatens the European, the writer adds, and it is so enervating for the professional man, that upon return home at the end of a hardworking day “we have little desire for recreation, and so no recreation is to be found”. The month of May, he writes on,
…brings thirty-one days of close, oppressive heat, and thirty-one nights of close, oppressive heat…when all possibility of sound sleep is gone, and we wake every hour and minute wet with perspiration; when even the crows have lost every power but that of cawing, – a power, confound them! that they never lose, – and stand desolate, with their hot wings held comically apart from their hot bodies…but still in Bombay we go to bed with the thermometer at 89°.
I Have A Dream: Obama’s Second Term
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
Next thing, Bradley Manning is pardoned. He leaves his cell, becomes a hero on the progressive circuit, and breaks up Barney Frank's marriage.
The Glass-Stegall Act is brought back and reinstated. The big banks all break in two, between commercial and investment banks. Their lamentations fall on deaf ears.
After a few Wall Street big wigs are prosecuted for fraud, finance capitalism finds itself hogtied by a weird wave of ethical behavior.
Following the example of North Dakota, all the states start their own banks. They withdraw all the money they have in Wall Street and pour it into their state banks.
Wall Street shrinks. There is a tax on all financial transactions. Many firms go bankrupt or close up for business. They just don't have as much money to play with as before. High-end prostitutes flee Wall Street for Qatar.
All companies registered in America have to declare their profits and losses as single entities. They are not allowed to have branches for tax purposes in other places, like the Cayman Islands. Therapists do a thriving business in tax lawyers when all tax loopholes are closed. For the first time in years, General Electric and Goldman Sachs pay actual taxes — at an actual rate of 30% plus. Their lamentations fall on deaf ears.
The Bush tax cuts are gone. All of us pay more taxes. But millionaires pay the most: a 50% rate. There is a one-time wealth tax of 15% on all holdings of the superrich, which wipes out our deficit in one mighty swoop.
The country has a surplus again, like it did under Clinton. The GOP goes into a megasulk.
Marijuana is legalized, and the economy of California makes a startling recovery.
The Birth, Decline, and Re-Emergence of the Solid South: A Short History
It is not an oversimplification to say that slavery was the single most important issue leading to the Civil War. For not only was slavery the most important on its own merits, but none of the other relevant issues, such as expansion into the western territories or states’ rights, would have mattered much at all if not for their indelible connection to slavery.
Initially, Northerners rallied around the issue of Free Soil: opposition to slavery on economic grounds. Small farmers and new industrial workers did not want to compete with large slave plantations and unpaid slave labor. This was the philosophy that bound together the new Republican Party.
No friends of African Americans, most Free Soilers were openly racist, as were the vast majority of white Americans at the time. Abolitionists, who were fired by religion and opposed human bondage on moral grounds, were actually a small minority of the population However, as the bloody war raged on, Northerners began to seek moral assurance in their cause. For more and more people, the mere political goal of saving the union did not seem to justify the unholy slaughter of men by the tens of thousand. Though preserving the union was always Abraham Lincoln’s primary goal, he astutely played to this concern by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and establishing abolition as the war’s moral compass. It worked. The North persisted, won the war, abolished slavery, and forced the South to return.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Take The Skyway
by Misha Lepetic
There wasn't a damn thing I could do or say
Up in the skyway
~The Replacements
The history of walking in American cities is one of the steady erosion of an activity that was so natural that its importance was almost entirely tacit. It is always amazing to realize how malleable our norms are: during the automobile’s first few decades, pedestrian fatalities were commonly greeted with criminal charges such as ‘technical manslaughter’. Drivers were viewed with mistrust, considered reckless and even represented class division. However, pedestrians became increasingly regarded as impediments to the velocity of modern life, and economic progress became increasingly associated with the automobile and the infrastructure that made its hegemony possible.
How did this change come about? As Sarah Goodyear writes in the Atlantic Cities blog,
One key turning point…came in 1923 in Cincinnati. Citizens’ anger over pedestrian deaths gave rise to a referendum drive. It gathered some 7,000 signatures in support of a rule that would have required all vehicles in the city to be fitted with speed governors limiting them to 25 miles per hour.
Local auto clubs and dealers recognized that cars would be a lot harder to sell if there was a cap on their speed. So they went into overdrive in their campaign against the initiative. They sent letters to every individual with a car in the city, saying that the rule would condemn the U.S. to the fate of China, which they painted as the world’s most backward nation. They even hired pretty women to invite men to head to the polls and vote against the rule. And the measure failed…The industry lobbied [for] the adoption of traffic statutes to supplant common law. The statutes were designed to restrict pedestrian use of the street and give primacy to cars. The idea of “jaywalking” – a concept that had not really existed prior to 1920 – was enshrined in law.
This was the beginning of a long and effective campaign that saw walking legislated and planned almost out of existence. Even now, designers and planners are often hobbled by a perspective which continues to favour the automobile over pedestrian – most ironically, in the name of safety.
Monday Poem
Another Piece of Eternity
I’m peeling back a page reading a new day
by the light of a new sun
.
mom died years ago, or was it yesterday?
.
I once read something similar by Camus
but was too new to understand that time bleeds
.
its dyes are not fast but run
between years and sometimes like old cloth
the colors of time become homogenous
.
but here’s this day blaring like a fanfare
from a new horn crisp as frost on glass
its brink sharp as the edge of a blade
slicing off another piece of eternity
.
.
by Jim Culleny
4/29/12
I support Quebec’s student protesters
by Quinn O'Neill
Reaction to the protests has been mixed and probably reflects a difference of opinion on the main function of education. For people who see education as a private good, the student protesters may appear to have an outrageous sense of entitlement. After all, if students are the ones who’ll benefit from the education, why shouldn’t they be expected to pay for it?
Others see education as a public good that plays an important role in a healthy, democratic society. If we’re going to let everyone vote and participate in important decision making that affects all of us, maybe it would be helpful if the public were well educated. Perhaps education would help people to better evaluate different sources of information, to understand important issues, and to make better decisions. A better educated society is also healthier and more productive.
Neither perspective is entirely wrong. Education is both a private and a public good, with significant benefits for the individual and for society as a whole. It is wrong, however, to suppose that education is only a private good, and this, unfortunately, seems to be a pervasive misconception.
Dwelling/Exile
DESTRUCTION OF HOME: Destruction is woven into the tapestry of the universe. Entropy, omeleteer of structured things, wields its indefatigable spatula. This is Entropy’s world we are living in – a world where things fly apart. This is a world where a toppled vase disintegrates into shards upon a polished floor, and where carnage cannot be made whole. A world where neither the King’s horses nor his men, can reconstitute that incautious ovum, Humpty Dumpty; a world where tender reverential hearts break, where young flesh bruises, where desire detumesces in the embers of fulfillment, where love itself withers on the vine, where old age trellises the skin, where bright hopes atomize, and where the mortuary awaits us all, sepulchral door swinging wide – candles lit, lambent and serene, within.
HOME IN BORN IN MOTION: Leaving home is a violent act, because walking is a violent act. Walking violates a stationary calm and announces, “this place does not satisfy my needs anymore”, or, “having served its purpose once, this place now bores me”. Walking derives, anciently, phylogenetically, from motile carnivory. It is rooted in impatience – the primordial impatience with waiting for morsels to waft on by. Motility is an ancestral condition. Life was born on the move. Flagellated, ciliated – gliding, and lashing – permanently unsatisfied and desirous. Motility is the characteristic act of animality. In their evolutionary procession, animals squirmed, wriggled, pulsated, swam, slithered, and later, lurched, crawled, leapt, hopped, flapped, flew, swarmed, brachiated, knuckle-shuffled and then most recently arose and walked away. Not the chosen option: repose is abandoned. A singular spot is forsaken. Beasts leave home to prowl and stalk, to kill and dine. Pursuing other options, bathed in the sunlight, were animals enduring cousins in the kingdom of plants. Left behind also: sessile brothers, animals hedging their bets by fiercely equipping with lures and tackle and macerating jaws.
Animals depart with teeth set in hungry mouths and they nibble on the world as they encounter it. The engulfing stoma of the ambulator, first and center of its anatomical toolkit, is nestled among the cranial sense organs. The arms and legs that flail behind are mere propellers towards the cosmic dining table. The frenetic peristalsis of the torso squeezes out the ejecta in our wake and makes room for new cargo. Most movement is ecology, and most ecology is trophic ecology. Ingestion is a fundamental act.
Monday, April 23, 2012
On eggs and cooking
by Rishidev Chaudhuri
The best example for how this book changed my thinking is its sections on the role of the egg. It is almost universally acknowledged that eggs, even accompanied by little else, are sublime and need not justify their ubiquity. But eggs also play supporting roles in a bewildering parade of dishes (especially in the cuisines of Europe), and in these they take on a variety of structural roles: changing the shape and form of food in addition to changing how it tastes. Making sense of this diversity of uses was enlightening: it allowed me to replace a number of disparate pieces of knowledge with some general principles and these principles then allowed me to think more creatively, beyond the confines of particular recipe patterns. And looking at the roles of eggs in food is also a wonderful lesson in chemistry and the strange hybrid states of matter that live everywhere in food.
Dismantled Chandeliers
by Mara Jebsen
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Love in A Time of Supermen
—Pina Bausch, choreographer
A set of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels has come out from Penguin classics, and they look exactly as they ought. They are small, hard-backed volumes in thick cream paper lined with flashy stripes of silver or gold. Some men of my acquaintance—especially those with big hands—might feel silly reading them on the subway.
But that’s as it should be. There’s a sequined fustiness hanging around the idea of Scott Fitzgerald. Maybe there’s something exhausting about the eternal waltzing of debutantes in white linen; and of tall, stiff-stomached boys getting drunk to distraction. Or really what’s exhausting is imagining all those high-school students across America sailing their way through the bright sadness that is “The Great Gatsby.”
The idea of his work gives me this exhausted feeling because his stuff is both classic and a glam cash-cow, categorized in the same cloud of atmosphere in my head where I keep the Titanic. Soon we will have Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrman’s film version of Gatsby adding his entire DiCaprio-ness into the circle of atmosphere that surrounds Fitzgerald, both deepening and cheapening whatever is this peculiar quality down at the middle of it. Luhrman and DiCaprio, I’m sure, will extend the bright circle of frost that allures, but obscures the filament at the center.
Brevity and the Soul
by Tom Jacobs
There is the apocryphal story in which Hemingway, sitting in a bar somewhere in Key West, is asked by an antagonistic admirer to follow his minimalism to its logical outcome and to tell a story in six words. As the story goes, Hemingway picks up a napkin and writes out the following words:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
This is a pretty good story. The reader has to kind of inhabit it and fill in all that is unsaid (which is pretty much everything), but there’s an inexhaustible sadness there in the spaces between the words. Everything pared away until there’s almost nothing left. The iceberg theory of fiction.
The genre of short short fiction (or microfiction, or whatever one might want to call it) is itself kinda small, and little of it is worth reading. But there are exceptions.
There’s this: “Sticks,” by George Saunders, perhaps the greatest super short story I’ve ever read:
| ||||
Here there is an entire novel’s worth of intrigue and emotional complexity and backstory and difficult familial relationships and unhappinesses and losses and redemptions. One can’t help but think of all those homes run by inexpressive and angry fathers who know something of love’s austere offices, these homes that suddenly erupt in holiday decorations that go waaay beyond the normal or expected. Rudolphs and Santas and baby Jesuses and lights and holly all over the place. This phenomenon…the phenomenon of the middle-to-lower-class father who has no creative outlet but finds an avenue in his front yard…this is an important aspect of contemporary life in the U.S., and one that needs more examination. There are dissertations here. And Saunders’ story is a most excellent jumping off point.
Saving Pakistan… and India?
by Omar Ali
Pakistan is in the throes of an existential crisis. Pakistan has always been in the throes of an existential crisis. Pakistan’s interminable existential crisis is, in fact, getting to be a bore. But while faraway peoples can indeed get away from this topic and on to something more interesting, Pakistanis have little choice in this matter; and it may be that neither do Indians.
The partition of British India was different things to different people, but we can all agree on some things: it was a confused mess, it was accompanied by remarkable violence and viciousness, and it has led to endless trouble. The Paknationalist narrative built on that foundation has Jihadized the Pakistani state, and defanging that myth is now the most critical historic task of the Pakistani bourgeoisie.
Well, OK. We don’t actually all admit any of those things, but all those are things I have written in the past. Today I hope to shed my inhibitions and go further.
First, the crisis. Some friends think I am being unnecessarily alarmist and the only crisis is the presence of American infidels/imperialists in the region. Let America leave and all will be well. Others believe that if the army had a “free hand”, they would have things under control within days. Let us dispense with both theories. The crisis is not primarily American generated (though they have a long and glorious history of feeding dollars to the crisis) and no one is in complete control. The existing corruption-ridden state is a British colonial creation struggling to get by alongside an unstable mix of Islamist ideology and a very shallow and self-contradictory foundational myth. Even though the karma of the Raj is potent stuff, it will not last forever against these forces. When it goes, the next step will not be the dawn of Chomskyan enlightened anarchy or democratic socialism; it will either be Salafist Islam or the dissolution of the state. Dissolution being physically and diplomatically difficult (who will handle the scramble over borders that would follow?), Salafist Islam administered by the army (perhaps with a charismatic cricketer as its public face) is the likely option.
Poem: “Fiction”
“Why didn't you make me eternal?”
Beauty asked God one day,
who replied: “The world's fiction
is carved from nothingness.
In changing colors you were born:
true beauty is ephemeral.”
The moon overheard this dialogue,
beamed it to the morning star
who woke the dawn, whispering sky's secret
to the dewdrop, earth's guardian.
Dew drenched the rose petals,
and Spring left the garden weeping.
Mohammed Iqbal (1877 -1938) one of the two great South Asian poets of the
20th Century (the other was Faiz Ahmed Faiz) advocated ceaseless endeavor,
writing with equal ease in Persian, Urdu, and English. He was knighted by the
British but is rarely called Sir Mohammed.
Translated from the Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari, guest poet at 3Quarks Daily.
[Click Urdu version to enlarge.]
Baby, my cash money
by Maniza Naqvi
This latest scandal, too will probably be obfuscated and news cycled out of our imaginations—but for this moment this paradigm is clear. Many complain that the US simply does not build relationships based on principles of social, human and cultural rights. The US engages only on the basis of financial transactions: it gets what it can’t get otherwise by simply buying it. If it is refused it simply removes the offending resister usually an elected leader of a country which has resources that the US wants and puts into place those who are compliant and willing to be paid for their services. And when, and if, they are not paid what they were told they would be paid, then well that’s when the whole thing becomes a conflict zone, like the corridor of the Hotel Caribe on the early morning after the “previous night’s intercourse.”
Ironically, this happened at an Economic Cooperation Summit where the agenda includes economic issues and those of Corruption and of Security or as it is called now Terrorism. The scandal around the Americans, involves 11 Secret Service agents and as many military personnel including green berets and so forth. Entrusted to protect the President of the United States the team had arrived in Cartegana ahead of the President who attended the Summit of the Americas conference organized by the 34-member Organization of American States.
The Daily Show and Politics
by Hannah Green
At this moment, I felt an impulse of self-righteous self-pity. It was hard being a college student right now. The economy is bad, everyone’s weighing their options looking for realistic job opportunities, the American dream of creating your ideal career seems to be dying, from a very young age I haven’t trusted my government or electoral system at all, especially in matters of foreign policy, and even here in the US we seem to be losing our rights left and right. I remembered a dark, sleep-deprived Wednesday when I was fourteen. My high school US Government teacher turned on the television so that we could watch John Kerry’s concession speech. My friend and I had been volunteering, answering letters at Democratic Campaign Headquarters in DC. We sat in the back of the classroom, dressed all in black, and wept in each other’s arms. I hadn’t even liked Kerry that much, but I had wanted so badly for Bush to lose. “It’s good to see young people who care so much,” our teacher said to us kindly. I thought, “I will never give a crap about politics again.”
Monday, April 16, 2012
What is philosophy, again?
by Dave Maier
There has been some interesting recent discussion, both here and elsewhere, about what philosophy is and should be. Here are two shiny pennies from my own purse.
Maybe we should simply shrug the question off. After all, no matter what you said philosophy was, one could always respond “okay, so what these other people do isn't 'philosophy' by your definition; but it's still worthwhile – maybe even more so than what you do under that name.” Coming up with a new name for what we have been calling “philosophy” seems even less pressing. Who cares what something is called, when what is important is whether and how to do it?
However (you knew this was coming), I think these debates can be quite enlightening – if you know what to look for. In any case that is our subject today.
1: Ontic science vs. the linguistic turn
So what is philosophy then? One common answer, usually just assumed but occasionally spelled out, is that philosophers try to discover the basic features of reality, just like science does. However, while physical science determines the nature of observable objects and processes, and thus contingent matters of fact, philosophy concerns itself instead with matters of metaphysical necessity, inquiring into the ultimate entities and structures underlying the world as we encounter it. This conception of philosophy is what Colin McGinn endorses in renaming it “ontic science”: non-empirical inquiry into the real.
On this view, the end result of our inquiry – as it must be if it is to be inquiry at all – is truth (specifically, true doctrines or theories); and the proper method in reaching it is precise, rigorous argument from universally accepted premises to an unambiguous, substantive conclusion. This is naturally easier said than done; and it is no secret that the list of universally accepted philosophical doctrines is – well, let's just say it's not long enough really to count as a “list”. However, I don't think that the lack of universally accepted doctrine shows all by itself that “ontic science”, which we might also call metaphilosophical “dogmatism”, is all wrong; a perfectly good response by my lights would be “well, after all, we Westerners have only been at this for 2500 years – what did you expect?”
If we can't agree, though, then maybe we're doing it wrong; and a natural place to look for the problem is in our instruments: our minds, and in particular, our language. Might these things be systematically distorting our view of reality? This question, along with important formal developments in logic and semantics (I condense and oversimplify here), led at last, in the mid-twentieth century, to what has become known as the “linguistic turn” in analytic philosophy (continental philosophy having broken off some time before).
We’ve Got to Be Artists of Some Kind
by Jen Paton
Chimamanda Adichie has a talk called “the danger of the single story.” She says, the “single story [that] creates stereotypes…that are not untrue…but incomplete.”
Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture
I watched three stories about American women this weekend: Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture (2010), the Diablo Cody written Charlize Theron “comedy” Young Adult (2011), and the blockbustering, blistering Hunger Games (2012). I suppose the latter is only tenuously about an American woman, as it takes place in a dystopian post war America called Panem where teenagers fight to the death on national television. But anyway.
Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture takes place in the now, and is about a girl named Aura who rather than fighting to the death posts semi-nude videos of herself on Youtube in a bid at artistic expression. Aura, who comes home from college in Ohio to crash in her artist mom's (amazing) Tribeca apartment and figure out what to do next. (Artist Mom on film is Dunham's IRL Mom, as is the apartment her IRL apartment). Aura has her liberal arts degree, and in college made aforementioned arty Youtube videos where she undresses in fountains. Now she finds work as a restaurant hostess and flirts with lackluster dudes. Tiny Furniture is, as Glenn Kenney put it, “a largely adroit film concerning largely insufferable people.” Not a lot happens. But it does rather capture a certain kind of inertia of a certain kind of kid, someone really smart who doesn't really have the tools to get their act together because the consequences of not doing so are minimal. Dunham contends that her friends say the apartment looks smaller in real life, but in spite of this, she rather gets the smallness of the world she portrays, and pokes some fun at it.
And yet, and yet – it is so hard to get beyond our single stories. Dunham, whose TV show, Girls, about young women in Brooklyn premiered yesterday, made the Girls characters from Ann Arbor because “I was trying to choose places that felt like they weren’t New York but had weirdly analogous intellectual communities, so that if these girls appeared and they were quipping their heads off and they’d watched certain kinds of films since they were three, it would make sense.” Because of course, nobody else watches “certain kinds of films” or experiences culture except New Yorkers, and those lucky enough to live in a distant archipelago of college towns.
Monday Poem
Topology
I love the space of your soul
the way it tends up and out
like that wide field in Conway
near the sugarhouse
which one spring blossomed
with dandelions
so dense and profuse
its rising hump
in the morning sun
was a mound of gold
whose brilliance
was more fabulous
than that most coveted ore
I love the niches and coves
of a soul that billows
like vapor through a sugarhouse roof,
through its cupola
—your sugarhouse soul
its volumes and transformations
its rich continuity
sweetens the shape of me
I love a soul that pushes
envelopes…. . …. I love
the edgy ellipse of your
horizon harrowing soul
a soul both
now and soon
here and there
turned in turned out
which, if I follow its piper's
Mobius band,
will lead me round
not to the place I was
but to the better side
of where I am
.
by Jim Culleny
4/12/12