To choose is to eliminate

“No no no no no no no no no no no no,” a cute toddler sang without a hint of punctuation. “She’s in love with the word ‘no’,” her grandmother explained.

Perhaps there is simply too much of everything around us, and we have to choose. Or the choice is not even solely dependent on our will. And any choice is a process of elimination of everything else. Or are there superwomen and supermen, these Übermenschen, who can take it all in? Human blackholes, what would become of the information compactly stored within them? Would it be reused in dreams, or lost in faulty synapsing? Would it remerge unexpectedly, uncalled for, to help in the creation of a new work of art? 

“No no no no no no no.”

“Thou shalt not pass!”

Different Walks of Life

The freedom to punch

Pope Francis in an airplane, and Dr. Gasbarri laughing at the prospect of being punched on the face by the former... because he's too weak by now?

«It's true that we can't react violently, but, for example if Dr. Gasbarri here, a great friend of mine, says a curse word against my mother, then a punch awaits him. It’s normal… It’s normal… One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people's faith, one cannot make fun of faith. There is a limit. Every religion has its dignity ... In freedom of expression there are limits.»

Those were the heightened, heavenly words of Pope Francis, specially so for he proffered them while flying in an airplane. Most likely even God Herself overheard him—he was that close to Her. 

Landing a fist on a friend’s face because the latter said something offensive about our mother is not the same as killing a dozen persons because our deceased and supposed Father was offended. So Francis’ argument seems not to take off right from the beginning.

But let’s imagine, for two minutes or a couple of thousand of years, that Francis' argument was valid, which is something we usually have to do anyway when the likes of Popes are talking. 

My father, who, like Muḥammad, is deceased, was a huge defender of the freedom of speech and of respect towards our intellectual opponents’ viewpoints. He even had the nerve to tell his progeny that he wasn't religious, but if any one of us five wanted to be baptized and follow a creed that he would hold nothing against us. 

Setting up limits to “freedom of expression,” as Pope Francis wishes, is no easy task. For instance, who would set those limits? And why those persons and not others?  And what about defining the limits themselves? Is the limit set to when someone is offended or feel that their beliefs are being made fun of? We’re always offending someone: reading the comments that Internet trolls leave on almost every website might help you reach that conclusion. So the complexity of setting any kind of limits to the freedom of speech is huge not to say insurmountable.  And what could the solution to it be? We can always try not to offend people, or accept the fact that our beliefs (and not only) will be offended, as that’s the way of the world, never forgetting that our beliefs are not us, and that beliefs can very well change. 

What I think is that Pope Francis, unless he apologizes for having said that there are limits, offended my father by not respecting his idea of no limits to the freedom of speech, and insulted my belief that religion—like any thing else, I repeat, like any thing else—has no dignity attached to it per se unless demonstrated, item by item. Francis also offended God for She's been thought to be a male for far too long.

And therefore, Pope Francis, according to his own reasoning, should be the first one to admit that I have the natural right to punch him in on the face. As I'm kind, I'll be happy if he just offers me one cheek to slap. Only one.  Only once.

Intimacy - a maturing tendril

for Jennifer


Intimacy is time plus its tempo entwined,
rooted deeply into a soil as black as fertile, 
under which water rushes—

mineral urges—and undermines
all that is past, and turns it into a paste 
by the time and tempo intimacy's vivified.    






_______

photo by backyardnature.com

The New Pantheon – The God of Economy

Now, this is a whimsical god if I ever saw one. Even the god of economy’s most devoted worshipers can by him be fooled and left stranded.

The realm of this god is vast, ranging from our vocal instruments—which also serve for us to eat, taste, kiss, and breathe, for instance—to a cleaning station where large fish go to have smaller fish or even shrimps remove their parasites.  Oh, yes: the god of economy doesn't care about humans alone, just as the goddess of sex doesn't, and that’s why they are true gods.

But this god is also deceptive. And he might be the one responsible for mirages. As one example, he’ll lure us into cheating on a school exam in order to attain our goal. Yet what happens is that the way to that goal, the process, is the one which will enrich us, and not the end result. So while our goal is achieved we didn't improve our condition at all. And that’s when you can hear the god of economy laugh a good laugh. He does love irony.

This new god's name, if you want to pray to him or ward him off, is Mireco.

As I’m writing this piece under the auspices of Mireco, I must stop here. You go and figure out the remainder of his characteristics.

_______

photo by Public Library of Science, depicting a reef manta ray at a cleaning station, maintaining a near stationary position atop a coral patch for several minutes while being cleaned by cleaner fishes

Faith, a puzzle out of bonds

The most important part
was left out of the scene;
the source of light that got in
was not part of the art,
each thought was locked within
each drawer, each head 
thus left alone to devise
what was being unseen.




______

watercolour by Jennifer Allison
One Street Shy

The New Pantheon - The Goddess of Sex

Recently I started playing a game called Words With Friends. That’s an app version of Scrabble, more addictive probably because your opponents can play with you any time, without the constraints of presence and... well... time. 

Quite an innocent thing, isn't it? 

Checking out the various menus of my new app I came across one named Community Match... And it turns out that the community is populated by photos, many of young women's selfies, some in bikini, some in underwear, and that you can search "community members" who are near you, and also based on their gender. So there you go: Tinder for Scrabblers.  

Gods won't disappear as long as there's a human being alive... who has the belief genes in him. So I want new gods. The old ones smell rotten no matter how you try to perfume them. And too many times the rottenness is that of human flesh.

Those apps prove once again the existence of probably the most important god for us: sex. Besides being one of the most pleasurable things you can do on earth, we all are the byproduct of sex, or of sexual fluids, for those who were conceived in vitro. Most of the things we deal with in everyday life can be traced back to the goddess of sex.

The second most difficult task after identifying a deity is naming it. In the western world tradition, we've the Greek (and Roman) Eros (Cupid), and Venus (Aphrodite). But they too smell of rotten flesh from having been gravely wounded by psychology or commerce, while Reproduction is too sterile a name for a god, no matter how new that god might be.

So here's my best shot for the time being: Penina.

Okay, okay! Vagenis then.

As if it mattered which came first.

The decline of TV

The Radio overshadowed the Minstrel,
TV did it to the Radio,
The Internet is doing it to all the Media;
Where's the shadow that Minstrels hide?  

Morning Dew

for Jennifer


Days of rain on her roof
soaked her attic’s woodwork 
under which, in tin trunks kept,
frailly locked by cobwebs and dust,
folded her whole being lays.

Water rushed out 
of pipes by the windows,
dormant seeds, down below,
drank it and sprouted,
and her garden flourished, 
as gardens do on days of rain.

Bone and Marrow

I should have explained my love for bones sooner:
How can we not love a bone? 
The last vestige of us and ours to be gone,
or as vulgar as a bloody boner?

Before we lie under a barrow,
there's only one thing here to be sorrow:
to be gone and all but bone tomorrow
without tasting some marrow.