Road (of life) Rage

Surely you have exploded at some innocent person who gets in the way of your anger. Relief is followed by remorse. Unfortunately, If you’d kept it inside, your complaint would still be rolling around in your head. Now it’s deposited. “Curb Your Dog?” The problem is retribution. Powerless inept creatures at the bottom of the food chain are the stuff of psychotic assassination. Have you ever given the finger to a driver honking at you to speed up your crossing of an intersection? He can’t do anything. He’s not going to leave his car. Wrong! He’s had a few and feels like one of Tom Wolfe’s “masters of the universe.” Even if he employs his MMA on you in word only, it still hurts.

read "The El" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn

Zukunft der Erinnerung

Zukunft der Erinnerung, "future of remembrance" is the title of a recent book reviewed in the TLS. The compound word Vergangenheitsbewaltigung,"the burden of the past" actually sounds like road directions, “Ausfahrt” or “exit “ a word you are likely to see on highways in Germany or Austria is onomatopoeic. Contrary to Merleau-Ponty words themselves which, by definition, lack the consciousness of their own being, are reeking with intention. Memory and the past are loaded issues anywhere but their significance is underscored by the rise of Germany’s Alternative fur Democracy (AfD), the movement embraced by JD Vance. As in the old Western Union Telegrams STOP! “Say no more, nudge, nudge “ to quote Monty Python.

Second Coming

 

The Last Judgement by Michelangelo

Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church because of his last novel Resurrection—essentially the final letter to the world from an author who walked out of his estate and died alone in the Arapovo station. Fitzgerald prophetically said there were no third acts in American life but reincarnation is one of the first things children learn about in Sunday school. Second Coming or just the old male refractory period? The urban legend is that the angel comes down and taps the little indentation below the nose and above the upper lip, to make you forget who you were. But no supernal force can lock or unlock the future. though; the writing is simply Living in the wreckage of one’s future is a slogan that’s often invoked about the pitfalls of projection. Then there’s the phoenix.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Ghostbusters

Have you ever felt there was unfinished business and wished you could cross eternity and get that one last word in with the dead? There's something unfair in being cut off by the end of someone else's life. It's like being stopped in mid-sentence. Late developers face this predicament. Say you had a successful parent. Once they're dead you may start to succeed, but it's too late. Isn't there supposed to be a party line with the afterlife? Isn't that what seances purport to do? You call up the apparition or shadow spirit of whomever at the seance, but instead of asking them how their afterlife is going, you go on about yourself. You've got a captive audience. They're not going anywhere, like that that editor or agent who told you they were on the way to meeting, even as they open the rest room door.  Poltergeists ("Geist" in German is "spirit") are harmless is one of the first things Ghostbusters learn.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Tristan

Passion in German is Leidenschaft or "love in death." Romanticism thrives on invisibility. That which doesn’t exist holds the upper hand to the extent that it has yet to be. Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet all partake of a love predicated on and amplified by impossibility. Gold is a reality, but paper which is prone  to inflation is the poetic currency. “The eternal feminine lures to perfection” says Goethe (Faust). Or to a stereophonic reality? The present is not the lingua franca of aspiration. Only when love has yet to be (or faces erasure through death) does it achieve its agony in ecstasies.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "Punk" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Bull in MN

There are relatively peaceful animals, one would suppose, but every living thing including minnows, which are preyed on by larger fish needs to eat--and not every living thing is content to live on grass. Which brings to mind the old joke about the bull. A guy dies and get reincarnated. He’s telling a friend about his great new life. He get up he eats he shits, he fucks. What he omits mentioning, significantly, is consciousness. The friend is incredulous and jealous until his old buddy informs him he’s come back as a bull in Minnesota. Which would you rather be, a nervous Manhattan health freak or contented stud? Mastication is also a desire peculiar to mammalian species. In any case, the bull is going to end up on top in all categories. It's not something that requires much thought.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "Punk" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Naphta

Davos

Democracy is, when you think about it, a rather esoteric concept. Majority rules and every vote counts are easy enough ideas to swallow—unless of course you are a believer in the divine right of kings or dictatorship of the proletariat. The American system of government emanates from Roman law. But "checks and balances," for instance, are plainly not working. Jurisprudence can defy the will of populace. But what will the future hold? The Catholic Church and the Communist party have something in common according Naphta, one of Thomas Mann’s characters in The Magic Mountain. The enlightenment view of it individual freedom leads to greed and chaos. But what happens when a religious or even secular state establishes a set of dictums. Plato’s Republic is probably the earliest example of this. Then there is Samuel Butler's Erewhon, an emordnilap which almost reads “nowhere.” In the absence of a Second Coming or Hegelian dialectic, one is left with a recipe created by Locke, Hume and Hobbes, an alternating toxic and intoxicating cocktail.

read "Rhododendron" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and read "Punk" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star