AdamSmith

V The mother invites humanity to her house And table. The father fetches tellers of tales And musicians who mute much, muse much, on the tales. The father fetches negresses to dance, Among the children, like curious ripenesses Of pattern in the dance's ripening. For these the musicians make insidious tones, Clawing the sing-song of their instruments. The children laugh and jangle a tinny time. The father fetches pageants out of air, Scenes of the theatre, vistas and blocks of woods And curtains like a naive pretence of sleep. Among these the musicians strike the instinctive poem. The father fetches his unherded herds, Of barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves Of breath, obedient to his trumpet's touch. This then is Chatillon or as you please. We stand in the tumult of a festival. What festival? This loud, disordered mooch? These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests? These musicians dubbing at a tragedy, A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this: That there are no lines to speak? There is no play. Or, the persons act one merely by being here.

IV Farewell to an idea . . . The cancellings, The negations are never final. The father sits In space, wherever he sits, of bleak regard, As one that is strong in the bushes of his eyes. He says no to no and yes to yes. He says yes To no; and in saying yes he says farewell. He measures the velocities of change. He leaps from heaven to heaven more rapidly Than bad angels leap from heaven to hell in flames. But now he sits in quiet and green-a-day. He assumes the great speeds of space and flutters them From cloud to cloudless, cloudless to keen clear In flights of eye and ear, the highest eye And the lowest ear, the deep ear that discerns, At evening, things that attend it until it hears The supernatural preludes of its own, At the moment when the angelic eye defines Its actors approaching, in company, in their masks. Master O master seated by the fire And yet in space and motionless and yet Of motion the ever-brightening origin, Profound, and yet the king and yet the crown, Look at this present throne. What company, In masks, can choir it with the naked wind?

III Farewell to an idea . . . The mother's face, The purpose of the poem, fills the room. They are together, here, and it is warm, With none of the prescience of oncoming dreams. It is evening. The house is evening, half dissolved. Only the half they can never possess remains, Still-starred. It is the mother they possess, Who gives transparence to their present peace. She makes that gentler that can gentle be. And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed. She gives transparence. But she has grown old. The necklace is a carving not a kiss. The soft hands are a motion not a touch. The house will crumble and the books will burn. They are at ease in a shelter of the mind And the house is of the mind and they and time, Together, all together. Boreal night Will look like frost as it approaches them And to the mother as she falls asleep And as they say good-night, good-night. Upstairs The windows will be lighted, not the rooms. A wind will spread its windy grandeurs round And knock like a rifle-butt against the door. The wind will command them with invincible sound.

You got a DNA swab? Not.

LOL

...pardon the repetition from another thread.

The ever-lovin' Guardian directs our attention to this side-splitter mocking the Romney campaign's quoting BO out of context...

II Farewell to an idea . . . A cabin stands, Deserted, on a beach. It is white, As by a custom or according to An ancestral theme or as a consequence Of an infinite course. The flowers against the wall Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark Reminding, trying to remind, of a white That was different, something else, last year Or before, not the white of an aging afternoon, Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon. The wind is blowing the sand across the floor. Here, being visible is being white, Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment Of an extremist in an exercise . . . The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach. The long lines of it grow longer, emptier, A darkness gathers though it does not fall And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall. The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand. He observes how the north is always enlarging the change, With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green, The color of ice and fire and solitude.

This jumps the gun a little bit. But then, the seasons do that to us. The Auroras of Autumn Wallace Stevens I This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless. His head is air. Beneath his tip at night Eyes open and fix on us in every sky. Or is this another wriggling out of the egg, Another image at the end of the cave, Another bodiless for the body's slough? This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest, These fields, these hills, these tinted distances, And the pines above and along and beside the sea. This is form gulping after formlessness, Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances And the serpent body flashing without the skin. This is the height emerging and its base These lights may finally attain a pole In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there, In another nest, the master of the maze Of body and air and forms and images, Relentlessly in possession of happiness. This is his poison: that we should disbelieve Even that. His meditations in the ferns, When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun, Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head, Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal, The moving grass, the Indian in his glade.

Update: Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Gay Marriage Likely To Go Before Supreme Court Within The Next Year BOULDER, Colo. -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Wednesday that she believes the Defense of Marriage Act will likely go to the U.S. Supreme Court within the next year. Ginsburg spoke at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She was asked a student-submitted question about the equal-protection clause and whether the nation's high court would consider it applying to sexual orientation. Ginsburg said with a smile that she couldn't answer the question. She said she could not talk about matters that would come to the court, and that the Defense of Marriage Act would probably be up soon. "I think it's most likely that we will have that issue before the court toward the end of the current term," she said. The 1996 law has been declared unconstitutional by a federal judge in New York and is awaiting arguments before the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Those oral arguments are scheduled for Sept. 27. The law was passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton after the Hawaii Supreme Court issued a ruling in 1993 making it appear Hawaii might legalize gay marriage. Since then, many states have banned gay marriage, while eight states have approved it, led by Massachusetts in 2004 and continuing with Connecticut, New York, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maryland and Washington state. Maryland and Washington's laws aren't yet in effect and might be subject to referendums. In February 2011, President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder instructed the Department of Justice to no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act. Ginsburg's remarks came at a conference sponsored by the University of Colorado law school. Ginsburg talked mostly about entering the legal profession when there were few female lawyers and even fewer judges. The students roared with laughter when Ginsburg told of scrambling even to find a women's restroom in law school at Columbia University in the 1950s. "We never complained, that's just the way it was," she said to laughter from the students. ___ Associated Press Writer Larry Neumeister in New York contributed to this report. http://www.huffingto..._n_1898815.html

Pardon! Please forgive. ...Maybe I could get away with blaming it on his (welcome) prolificness here? Or how about ...there is a very loud amusement park directly across the road from where I sit typing this... -- Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire, Nabokov

No need to apologize. Mitt did all those things, not you. Hell Week is right for him. And the polls are part of that Hell. electoral-vote.com, an aggregator of latest polling data nationwide, currently shows 323 electoral votes to Obama, 206 to Romney, 9 ties. That is one Hell of a gap to close in 7 weeks. ...Come to think, the mass of Mitt's self-inflicted wounds puts me in mind of Milton's Satan, saying Hell is not just a place, but rather... "Myself am Hell!"

YOU THINK?!?!?!

Well, there may be a lower bound to the size of mammal that is practical...

Exactly. Dowd would never have thought to call him "Shrub." Which was just too perfect.

My life partner. My best friend. She for whom I cook wonderful dinners. She whom I love. Why does emotional fidelity need to be tied to physical monogamy?

Further to EXPAT's recent citation of the Dalai Lama's statement that "If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change," I just noticed this interview with the Dalai Lama by Arianna Huffington on what he views as the (necessity of) the convergence of science and spirituality. Affirming and hope-giving, from my viewpoint... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/arianna-the-dalai-lama_b_1515059.html

May MsGuy absolve me...but intriguing, to say the least. 'The Gospel Of Jesus' Wife,' New Early Christian Text, Indicates Jesus May Have Been Married A discovery by a Harvard researcher may shed light on a controversial aspect of the life of Jesus Christ. Harvard Divinity School professor Karen L. King says she has found an ancient papyrus fragment from the fourth century that, when translated, appears to indicate that Jesus was married. The text is being dubbed "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife." The part of it that's drawing attention says, "Jesus said to them, 'my wife'" in the Coptic language. The text, which is printed on papyrus the size of a business card, has not been scientifically tested to verify its dating, but King and other scholars have said they are confident it is a genuine artifact. "Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim," King said at a conference in Rome on Tuesday. "This new gospel doesn’t prove that Jesus was married, but it tells us that the whole question only came up as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage. From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better not to marry, but it was over a century after Jesus’s death before they began appealing to Jesus’ marital status to support their positions." King, who focuses on Coptic literature, Gnosticism and women in the Bible, has published on the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Mary of Magdala. She presented her research Tuesday evening in Rome, where scholars are gathered for the International Congress of Coptic Studies. The idea that Jesus was unmarried and chaste is largely accepted by Christian denominations and a reason for the practice of celibacy among Roman Catholic priests. "Beyond internal Catholic Church politics, a married Jesus invites a reconsideration of orthodox teachings about gender and sex," said journalist and author Michael D'Antonio, who writes about the Catholic Church, in a blog on The Huffington Post. "If Jesus had a wife, then there is nothing extra Christian about male privilege, nothing spiritually dangerous about the sexuality of women, and no reason for anyone to deny himself or herself a sexual identity." The quote about Jesus' wife is part of a description of a conversation between Jesus and his disciples. In the conversation, Jesus talks about his mother twice and speaks once about his wife. One of them is identified as "Mary." His disciples discuss whether Mary is worthy of being part of their community, to which Jesus replies, “she will able to be my disciple.” The fragment has eight incomplete lines of writing on one side and is badly damaged on the other side, with only three faded words and a few letters of ink that are visible, even with the use of infrared photography and computer-aided enhancement. The private owner of the papyrus first approached King in 2010. King said she didn't believe the document was authentic, but the owner persisted. She then asked the owner to bring the papyrus to Harvard, where she became convinced it was a genuine early Christian text fragment. Along with Princeton University professor Anne Marie Luijendijk and Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, King claims to have confirmed the document is real. The document's owner has not been named and King said he does not want to be identified. It's unclear when the text was initially discovered. The owner who showed it to King found it in 1997 in a collection of papyri that he acquired from the previous owner, who was German. The papyri included a handwritten German description that had the name of a now-deceased professor of Egyptology in Berlin who called the fragment a "sole example" of a document that claims Jesus was married. The scholars believe the text is from Egyptian Christians before the year 400, as it is written in the language used at that time. Since writing appears on both sides of the fragment, scholars believe it came from a codex, a kind of book, and not a scroll. The scholars also believe the document is a translation of an earlier one that was likely written in Greek. King notes in her research that the idea of Jesus' celibacy hasn't always existed, and that early Christians debated whether they should marry or practice celibacy. It was not until around the year 200 that Christian followers began to say Jesus was unmarried, according to a record King cites from Clement of Alexandria. In his writing, Clement -- an early theologian -- said that marriage was a fornication put in place by the devil, and that people should emulate Jesus by not marrying. One or two decades later, Tertullian of Carthage in North Africa declared that Jesus was "entirely unmarried" and told Christians to remain single. But Tertullian did not come out against sex altogether and allowed couples to get married one time, denouncing divorce and remarriage as overindulgent. A century earlier, the First Epistle of Paul to Timothy said in the New Testament that people who forbid marriage are going by the "doctrines of demons," but did not include anything about Jesus being married in order to make the point. The point of view that ultimately became dominant was that celibacy is preferred as a high sexual virtue among Christians, but that marriage is needed for the sake of reproduction. "The discovery of this new gospel," King said, "offers an occasion to rethink what we thought we knew by asking what role claims about Jesus' marital status played historically in early Christian controversies over marriage, celibacy, and family. Christian tradition preserved only those voices that claimed Jesus never married. The Gospel of Jesus's Wife now shows that some Christians thought otherwise." The life of historical Jesus is often a matter of controversy, and this is not the first time it's been proposed that Jesus was married. Most recently, Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code" depicted Jesus as being married to Mary Magdalene. The book was published as fiction, but nonetheless attracted loud criticism from Vatican officials. Front of fragment with translation Back of fragment with translation UPDATE: 4:28 p.m. -- Speaking on a conference call Tuesday from Rome, King said that some people who have read about the discovery have asked if the papyrus fragment was describing Jesus as being married to the Christian faith, not to a woman. "One cannot overrule that it might be him saying 'my wife as a church,' but in the context where he's talking about 'my mother' and 'my wife' and talking about 'my disciple,' the one thing you would not say is that the church would be 'my disciple.'" Even before King's discovery, there has been speculation that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. "I do not think Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene," King clarified Tuesday, adding, "whether he was or was not married ... I really think the tradition is silent and we don't know." King also said that a professor who saw her report asked her if the text on the papyrus could have been a homily and not a gospel, an idea she said she had not considered. King added that she hopes the discovery will diminish the view outside of academic circles that the debate over marriage and sexuality in the early church is "fixed and over." In current church debates over issues such as same-sex marriage and marriage among Catholic priests, "having more voices from the early church and a better, more accurate version of early Christianity is more helpful," she said. UPDATE FROM AP: 8:33 a.m. Wolf-Peter Funk, a noted Coptic linguist and co-director of the francophone project editing the Nag Hammadi Coptic library at Laval University in Quebec, said there were "thousands of scraps of papyrus where you find crazy things," and that many questions remain unanswered about the Harvard fragment. http://www.huffingto...ref=mostpopular

Verbatim, spelling & grammar unchanged: Dear Governor Romney, I’d like to say congratulations on winning the republican nomination. But, I wish you stayed in Massachusetts. You’re plan for America isn’t what we need, and would hurt us more than it would help. First, repealing Obama care and other health plans he’s put in place have helped families across America, including mine. I live in a middle class family, and two years ago my little sister; Kennedy was denied insurance because of her pre-existing condition. This was a huge emotional stress and financial burden on my entire family. Under Obama Care, insurance companies can no longer deny Kennedy and kids like her, the coverage they need and deserve. Because of Obama care my little sister was able to have the several surgeries she needed that helped save her life. Once the President was elected he put Obama Care into action, just like he promised and made it so that you could get insurance with pre-existing conditions. This has made a direct impact on my family. My family is with out a doubt better off now, than we were four years ago! It is to my understanding that you stated that you were going to repeal Obama Care, including the part I have mentioned, which will take away the insurance we have and need for my sister Kennedy. Why do you think she doesn’t deserve health care? Also, when you were interviewed on “Meet the Press”, you stated that you would NOT repeal this part of Obama Care, but then your campaign backpedalled and on the “Tonight show with Jay Leno”, you said that you WOULD repeal this. Also, you’re domestic plans (birth control, gay rights etc.) are horrible! Women should get to manage their own health, and if you wonder why you’re not appealing to many women voters, rethink your birth control and women’s’ rights plans. And people should be able to marry whom they want. We built this country so people could have freedom, and not have religious beliefs control them to that length. This country was in no way built on any religion, so we should not create laws that repress the American people in a religious way and hurt our most vulnerable. Sincerely, Jackson Ripley, age 12 http://www.huffingto...ref=mostpopular

LOL Actually he is not even one of the three or four big blond white boys on the planet whom I would go to much trouble to do or be done by. You know my types -- Asian, Latino, black!

One of our national fixations... ...not to say pastimes!

Who made up THAT rule? Anyway, if I followed that rule, then where would my spouse go to have sex?

Pardon. On reflection, clinically maybe there are six: Men Women Male-to-female transgender before genital reassignment surgery Male-to-female transgender after genital reassignment surgery Female-to-male transgender before genital reassignment surgery Female-to-male transgender after genital reassignment surgery On this count, I have only been with 50% of the possibilities (...as far as I know!). Three more items for the bucket list.

You always have to have everything spelled out! Men Women Male-to-female transgender Female-to-male transgender I said "sex," not "sexual preference." If you factor preference into it, the combinatorials would be beyond my calculational competence.

As TY says, identifying attributes, at least to and for oneself, seems more useful and informative than trying to corral them into one or another (of somebody else's) set of boxes. I find I usually want sex with men more strongly than I do with women. But not always; depends on mood, moment, individual partner. Likewise, my romances have almost always been with men, but not entirely. Those are phenomena that describe the situation. Whereas what do labels really do these days? "Gay" is good in context of pressing publicly for social change. "Queer" I like because it can draw strong reaction one way or the other. "Bi" is so contaminated by now that it frequently derails any discussion into catcalls between the person who self-applies it and accusers leaping to charge "You're in denial," "There's really no such thing," etc., despite what Kinsey et al. showed long ago about the continuum. I prefer "quad," having slept with 3 of the 4 sexes, having yet only to meet Vic Hunt, the Boy with a Cunt.