tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40914868298208431752024-02-21T01:44:35.977-05:00New PotpourriWorks by Roberta SchulbergGoro not under other publisher's copyrightRobertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-30790644910837825282011-12-07T17:47:00.001-05:002011-12-07T17:48:28.856-05:00I wrote notes for this poem in 2008 but never got around to writing it, preferring to concentrate on more timely themes. I went back to it and wrote it in the past month. <br />
--------Roberta<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">"FEATHERLESS BIPED"</span> <br />
<br />
Is that who we are, pinned projections, rotund protrusions?<br />
Is our shape, mammalian, bi-pedal, definition of our measure?<br />
Is our essence curvilinear hemispheres which provoke intrusions, <br />
Vertical shaft of leg, splayed trapezoidal foot under pressure?<br />
<br />
Is our shape, mammalian, bi-pedal the definition of our measure?<br />
We are more like the scintillant energy which smithys palpable that stride, <br />
The vibrance sentient coursing through that staunch foot under pressure,<br />
The visible is wrought of pulsing consciousness into outward form plied. <br />
<br />
We are more like the scintillant energy which smithys palpable that stride, <br />
Emotive prods that spur to joy, fear, grief, hatred, or devotion. <br />
Emotions wrought of agitant vectors into sensibility are plied. <br />
They bourrée, jetté; plié, and arabesque, trajectiles plaited into passion. <br />
<br />
Emotive prods that spur to joy, fear, grief, hatred or devotion,<br />
Actions which to actions of deliberation us impel <br />
Bourrée, jetté; plié and arabesque; trajectiles plaited into passion. <br />
Resultant action, deliberation, is the animate action quintessential.<br />
<br />
Emotive prods are actions which to actions of deliberation us impel. <br />
We are summary of their impetus, their outward decisive focus.<br />
The resultant action, deliberation, is the animate action quintessential <br />
But intellection, deliberation using symbol, has here on earth just us as locus.<br />
<br />
Transcending the summary of impetus, the world is intellect's outward ultimate focus. <br />
Geometries and formulas, words, lines, sounds, and colors limn our earthly percepts.<br />
Intellection, deliberation using symbol has here on earth just us as locus. <br />
Wondrous interactive, symbolic intellect conveys from mind to mind our concepts.<br />
<br />
Geometries and formulas, words, lines, sounds, and colors limn our worldly percepts.<br />
Uses of symbol to rabble rouse or exhortations to transcend are also intellective actions. <br />
Wondrous interactive, symbolic intellect, bonding mind to mind with precepts: <br />
Opinions, convictions, laws, religions, propaganda, rules, conventions.<br />
<br />
Use of symbol to rabble rouse and exhortations to transcend are also intellective actions. <br />
Intellection's uses of symbol empowers every self with Choice: <br />
Opinions, convictions, laws, religions, propaganda, rules, conventions.<br />
Scintillant palpable strides limning formulations, every self an energetic synapse, one locus of a worldly voice. <br />
<br />
Intellection's uses of symbol empowers every self with Choice. <br />
We are the transparent sinews of ideas' conveyance, the tendons of mind to mind.<br />
Scintillant palpable strides limning formulations, every self an energetic synapse, one locus of a worldly voice. <br />
How can something so diaphanous as these tendons have such tensile strength to bind?<br />
<br />
We are the transparent sinews of ideas' conveyance, the tendons of mind to mind, <br />
Recounters of observations, formers of ethos' scaffolding of nations and religions. <br />
How can something diaphanous as these tendons have such tensile strength to bind?<br />
Who would loose us from true witness, insistent that our essence is pinned projections, rotund protrusions, <br />
Deluded cynics promulgating self-satisfied exclusions, contemptuous distortions, jaded intrusions?<br />
<div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-88155960934779937352011-10-28T15:59:00.006-04:002011-11-24T17:54:23.101-05:00<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: left;">October 28, 2011</div><br />
Here is a story with its illustration whose idea began in 2008. The illustration and the story were conceived at the same time as a unit. Other ideas which I wanted to get off my chest became more pressing, so I put the story and its illustration aside and picked them up again in the past month. I wanted to keep picture and story together, so since it's two works, please consider it a two months entry. Like Alice in wonderland, I'm running to stay in place. <br />
---------Roberta<br />
<br />
Written and illustrated by Roberta Schulberg aka Roberta SchulbergGoro <br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvkZU-dmfzmSWwPI1LUXYw7TpChnOn4JKp5ZHxeoriRstz60ZcBxw00vI-7aKX30v15SwGgvgI8-wHCaR7vDjZBl-7JGhV54pFKQZ0WorCD54JJcP0sBnJF54lxYVJAwFCXPELSltsoeu0/s1600/Flattened+-+AMBITION-additional+version+10-29-2011.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" hda="true" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvkZU-dmfzmSWwPI1LUXYw7TpChnOn4JKp5ZHxeoriRstz60ZcBxw00vI-7aKX30v15SwGgvgI8-wHCaR7vDjZBl-7JGhV54pFKQZ0WorCD54JJcP0sBnJF54lxYVJAwFCXPELSltsoeu0/s320/Flattened+-+AMBITION-additional+version+10-29-2011.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"></div><span style="font-size: large;">AMBITION</span><br />
<br />
"Oh sure Russell, the studio offered me a job as assistant director, it's already in the bag, but...." Sitting across from Mickey at a small round side table, Russell observed the barely contained energy in Mickey's nervous repeated shoulder shrugs and was delighted to be able to recognize that unchanged characteristic habit of his old friend after all these years. "Well, well," he thought, "so Mickey is still the old dynamo." Russell, with a hardly perceptible stir, checked his own immediate urge to straighten his back to lean forward in order to listen intently, reminding himself to present to his friend only a calm, relaxed, composed appearance. <br />
<br />
"Listen, Russell. You know me; I've got a long track-record. The whole industry knows me. And I know everyone, everyone in it." As he spoke, Mickey's mouth made extraneous movements, as if his mouth itself was searching for a way to phrase it. "Buuuut it's a new ballgame out there and um, Hollywood's taken a fall. We both know you're probably the best bet for hooking up to whatever is the "now" thing. Umm, uh, mm, I'd take the risk of refusing a major in the industry to get in on a great ground floor." <br />
<br />
Russell pulled back tighter into his chair and stiffened. His chin receded, nestling for safety into his neck. He answered with some hesitation, "True. ~I'm involved in some new things. High tech video, for one state of the art. And I've been able to make some inroads into T.V. production. No one is yet doing what I intend to do. Ya gotta shake people up. Remember when we talked about it? Shake 'em out of their conformity, the damned past is all mincing conformity. I'm not free to discuss it at this time, but," His hand rested lightly on the table and he abstractedly brushed his hand back and forth on the fulcrum of his wrist, his little finger lightly grazing the table as he spoke, "I'm in closeted talks with a high-tech video group. This group is tops." His head waggled, "But I just can't make any promises right now without consulting the others." Suddenly his countenance lifted and his face beamed with a smile. "But I can recommend you as definitely not being dead wood. Let's keep in contact this time, Mickey." <br />
<br />
"It's probably because your Aunt Lorraine and I were divorced and not speaking to each other that you didn't call me, huh Russell?" <br />
<br />
"No Mickey. Our friendship didn't depend on Lorraine. I didn't call you because your sudden flying off without good-byes told me you didn't want old friends pulling you back and hanging on to you. Still working for the magazine?" <br />
<br />
"No, I left Point and Tell before I split with Lorraine. After you and I planned our getting into film I decided to stop talking and start acting. Talking wasn't going to bring me past my pages of documentary snapshots and verbatim interviews. I knew I'd need the time to move freely, untrammeled, take a look around. I planned ahead for the move. I put cash away so I wouldn't have to settle for first offers. Well, it didn't take long after my arrival in California for ZJCalititan studios to offer me a position as apprentice director under Mannaheim. I would have to begin with prop man duties, learn the ropes department by department. Mickey turned his head away as if to avoid Mannaheim. He returned his head to face Russell. Iiiiiiii've got too many years behind me to settle for that. I've been told that when I walk into a room y' can feel the tension. Iiiiiiiiii have no patience for the small stuff; I-I've got to get above it, put my energies into where it counts. I still do know a couple of the top go-getters I worked with at the magazine; they've already made their move into internet news and documentaries. Nothing big yet but they're working on plans for an independent studio. Here and there I do some freewheeling stuff. You know a family is a drag pulling you down when you're starting out in a tough business. Lorraine never bothered me for alimony and I'm no big spender. I'm just getting along but I'm free as the wind." <br />
<br />
Russell felt relieved that Mickey was not going to be so distasteful as to press him further regarding his own video connections. His mouth turned down in commiseration. He thrust his lower lip out, deepening his frown as he slid his tongue forward against the roof of his mouth. "I've had some rough tobogganing myself," he was willing to confide. "The electric company laid me off along with most of their other technicians. Of course, there's the video, but it's just in the initial stages. The small business of wholesale hand-held HDTV's which I bought for my daughter's marriage gift helps. She works it and I get a cut. When my wife Hattie died I sold our house. Instead of moving back to the old house left to me and Lorraine, I decided to unload it. Aunt Lorraine bought out my portion and the bank financed the house based on her library job. I gave Lorraine a good deal and I paid for this cabin in cash. I owe no one a thing."<br />
<br />
"Don't worry Mickey, the divorce won't affect any business we have together. I'm so busy I hardly bother with Aunt Lorraine myself. I don't want to be weighed down right now either. I know the score. Lorraine's still the same annoyance to have around. Now that we're able to talk frankly I can tell you what first tipped me off about her. This was a long time ago. Russell gritted his teeth in a scowl, his body quivering in controlled anger at memories of having to tolerate the presumptions of his aunt. I was still a child, but as long as the time has been I will never forget it. He lifted his hand, energetically pointing the index finger of his trembling hand upward, "Story One," a wait-'til-you-hear-this-one determination to tell all was easily readable on Russell's face. "In the seventh grade I was selected for an advanced study program for elementary school honor science students. Aunt Lorraine was in her last year of high school. When the family was at the table celebrating the award, Aunt Lorraine, in a facade of casualness, mentioned her ambition of writing a book like Rochelle Sunsun's The Fish Below Streaming Waters or Susan Speaker's How the Brain Remembers. At that time she said to me, 'We ought to put our heads together.' Remembering that moment, Russell's face reddened in rage and he extended his head toward Mickey, his voice lifting to just under a shout, "What she meant was she wanted to put her fingers into my piece of pie." He leaned back. "She lacked any sense of her own limitations, trying to advance by latching on to others' gains. It's my guess she hardly managed to get through high school. Ever since that time I pretty much steer clear of her. She is, quite frankly, a drag to know. So I live alone here in the cabin, she lives alone in the old house, and we hardly see each other." Russell relaxed, then laughed silently, allowing his tensely wired shoulders to bob up and down slightly as he snapped his fingers, all five, one after the other in rotation, a calisthenic he had developed as a youngster. "I know you've had some time with it too, huh Mickey, keeping your feet on the ground and keeping the damned leeches out?" he managed to wheeze through his laugh. "I have no trouble recommending you on that score." <br />
<br />
Mickey's relief in Russell's understanding of his situation allowed his old feeling of comraderie to strengthen as he began to brush aside any fears of rejection which Lorraine caused by her unalterable family relationship to his old confidant. "The only way to avoid Lorraine's interference was to go off to another room together whenever we had to make decisions. Did Lorraine ever have an idea which became effective?" Mickey joined Russell in his mirth, "What did Lorraine actually study anyway?" Mickey put a finger in his cheek and popped it, the sound like the bursting of a small balloon. "Oh, sure. She would think 'Susan Speaker.' His laughter intensified, "She would think 'Michelangelo,' 'masterpieces.' No sense about deadlines, pressures in the industry, competition, no concept of the tough fight out there in the world." He rolled his eyes up, extended his lower lip, and blew a gust of wind against his forehead. "She disapproved of my selling the darkroom equipment when the magazine took over the lab work. She said the few dollars from the sale didn't mean anything; I ought to keep working on all aspects of my craft. Imagine thinking y'can spend a whole lifetime just leisurely learning a craft - like I had a patron, like someone would catch me if I fell off candy-cane mountain. She talked about career, but woman are built to be dependent, to be wherever she's needed by her man, not lost in daydreams. Lorraine has no sense of the bottom line. I wanted her secure at home. I told her right from the beginning - what the man does is more important because he's got a grip on the world; he's the one who's the support, it's he who's got to make his mark, not waste his time with stuff that doesn't pay off. I told her right away, I'm her success. Russell, women wouldn't have a thing without us." <br />
<br />
"Y'know Mickey, our family did not bring up Lorraine to indulge in hopeless dreams and ambitions the way she does. Her mother Kate, my grandmother, showed her. Serve your man and get your piece of pie. Kate was like an angel but Lorraine never took after her. Normal women like Grandma Kate accept reality on a domestic plane, find fulfillment in taking care of the everyday needs of everyone around them. That's the way to their success. Women like that do better. I don't remember my mother; I was an infant when her plane crashed down on her way to visit my father's army training campgrounds, but I've been told she was an angel like Grandma Kate. What normal women do have is patience, submission. In the dreary routine they are a saving grace. They are a yielding kindness in shattering conflict. For them, love leads the way. Men have to be different. We've got to go after it when we can."<br />
<br />
"I'll say this for her, Russell, Lorraine was always there when I needed her. I'm not blaming her about that. But a man has to spread his wings, fly over his house, not be tied down to it. She wanted to come along to California. I knew I needed more than settled domesticity. I was becoming middle aged, had never sown any wild oats or had adventures. I didn't want her questioning me." <br />
<br />
"Women have no way of really understanding us, Mickey. I learned that early. No man can be blamed for being a man. One Christmas, even before I began in school, I received an enormous clown from my grandparents; it must have been about five feet high, of soft leather-like plastic, and weighted inside on the bottom by a bunch of small rolling balls so it always stood upright. Well, almost that clown taught me to be a man. It was taller than me. I began to punch it like a boxer with my fists and at that moment I began to know what being a man was all about. I knew then that I would have to punch my way, fight to reach my own height in it. I could feel manliness swell inside of me, radiating through my veins, enlarging me, readying me for the world. So what does Aunt Lorraine do when she passes by? Does she realize with awe the power I was receiving? No. She asks in passing, 'Do you want me to teach you how to read?' She said 'reading will open the whole world to you. You will find out about other times, far away places.' I mean, the whole realization of what life on earth is about was opening up to me and she asks me if I want to learn how to read. Another year or two I'd be strapped to a school desk, required to sit still, to keep quiet and she asks if I want her to rush it." <br />
<br />
"Russell, she has no concept of life's toughness beyond the door of her own playroom. When I began to get interested in film, I told her 'The sword of Damocles hangs over me. It's war out there.' She said 'There's no war except the one you're making for yourself. Why didn't you stay put in your darkroom - here!'" <br />
<br />
"What she's got is worse than a sheltered naivete, Mickey. I can tell you a doozy of a story. One day Lorraine called me over to point out a small metal door in the back wall of the playroom closet. It was about a foot square, the door and its bolt sealed by paint. Then she took me around to the other side of that wall which was in the kitchen. The wall was covered by a backless cupboard whose bottom cabinet opened to reveal a metal door in the wall exactly matching the first. It too was sealed shut. She imagined a wonderful mystery behind it so she asked me to help her get it open. I told her it was a sealed old heating duct from the disused coal cellar and I refused to bother to help her pry it open. She had placed her homework desk near the closet and every once-in-a-while she would try to pull open that bolted and sealed duct." She once told me, 'I can hear voices through that sealed door.' She said she heard a voice say 'Put up a new fence.' and another voice answered 'Done.' When she looked out the window the old fence was disappointingly still there but then the next week - there was the new fence." I said 'It was Grandpa talking in the cellar.' She said, 'No, I told him about the voices and he said 'That wasn't me, that was the spirit of my doppelganger planning a surprise.' I asked Lorraine 'Do you believe in doppelgangers?' She said, 'I believe voices can travel through time and space.' She's always searching for mysteries where they don't lie. I knew then her lack of a sense of reality was all of her own making. Her mind was just flights of fancy, mystical enthusiasms. There's no getting through to her. Of course she was a kid then, not much older than me, but she never grew up. Later she continued to use that same desk to write her mystical theorizings. One corner of the desk was stacked with her monthly Science For The Amateur magazines and the other corner piled with her mystical essays. She had ecstatic dreams of future achievements but - you know the story - there never was a payoff. About her its ...." He raised his palms outward in front of him, his entire body quivering with antipathy and appalled anger; he shook his head from side to side and he grimaced with a laugh that contained tears. "I knew by then she was no more than flights of fancy, unfounded enthusiasms. She was a kid then, not much older than me, but she never grew up." He slowly returned himself to a slumped composure, his eyes still moist. <br />
<br />
Mickey sympathized with Russell's dismay by showing approval of Russell's judgement, reiterating the characteristic failings of their mutual acquaintance. "What did Lorraine study? Who does she know? "I'm glad we've gotten together again, Russell. It's just like old times. We should stick together. We think a lot alike, you and me; we ought to join forces." <br />
<br />
"Your sense of the practical is strong, Mickey. I've been thinking how sharp you were to stick with internet based programming, not narrowing to the merely entertainment end. The internet opportunity is stronger since it has a broader base. It can always contract a video group. Video is continual expense for too infrequent a return. Constancy and long term survival - that's practicality." <br />
<br />
The two friends had begun to walk to the door.<br />
<br />
"Russell, the truth is, I don't want to get caught somewhere out in the boondocks. The internet group might have to settle for inroads in the sticks at this point. Your video group might have the answer. I can add my hands-on documentary expertise to your urbanity." <br />
<br />
"When will the internet group be ready to roll Mickey?" <br />
<br />
"Ummm, a few things have to be settled first buuuut I can give you a ball park figure." Mickey pursed his lips, his tongue pressed against his upper pallette. He turned up his eyes, calculating the time, "Mmmm..." His tongue clacked loudly on the roof of his mouth, forging the way for his voice to follow, "Clack. I guess ten or twelve weeks." <br />
<br />
Standing in the doorway, Russell scratched his chin. "My video group needs at least a year and a half before they're in full swing. Meanwhile all I can do now is wait. Mickey, I don't mind the boondocks. I've only got this cabin anyway. I'm rearing to go. I've got high tech connections that'll make the metropolis come running to you. Let's keep each other on top of the list this time. We've got a long history together. I'll call soon. Let's call each other soon." <br />
<br />
The two men stood shaking hands in the doorway. With nothing actually settled, it seemed to both like the parting was premature. Then Mickey's hunched shoulders swung toward the path as Russell pulled himself back behind the door frame. Mickey turned back to wave his arm in a second friendly goodbye. Russell closed the door with a heavy wooden thump and as the doorlock engaged with a loud clunk, there was heard, from an indistinct distance and vague direction, the clatter of a small metal door being shut against its metal frame and the snap of its metal bolt being shoved into place. <br />
<br />
<div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-90791028329913277282011-09-03T17:01:00.000-04:002011-09-03T17:01:12.771-04:00A mini-drama<span style="color: red; font-size: x-large;">HI. HAPPY LABOR DAY. - Roberta</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Lookat'er - A Slapstick Nursery Drama</span> <br />
<br />
By Roberta Schulberg aka Roberta SchulbergGoro<br />
<br />
<br />
<u><strong>CHARACTERS</strong></u><br />
<br />
GRETCHEN: granddaughter to Holly, niece to Chuck, grandniece of Manero. She is grown but had lost her parents as a child. <br />
<br />
HOLLY: grandmother to Gretchen , mother to Chuck, sister to Manero. <br />
<br />
CHUCK: uncle to Gretchen, son of Holly, nephew of Manero.<br />
<br />
DONNA: wife of Chuck, daughter-in-law of Holly, aunt of Gretchen through marriage to Chuck.<br />
<br />
MANERO: Holly's brother, great uncle of Gretchen, uncle of Chuck.<br />
<br />
NEIGHBOR: a stranger.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>STAGE</strong></span><br />
<br />
The stage is described as if seen from one front side only in order to maintain relationship among the four walls. The stage may be in the round. Livingroom is furnished sparsely but furniture is ornate in Rococco style, possibly gilded, suggesting empires. There are four varying rococco side side chairs roughly in a circle. There is a hassock more-or-less included in the chair circle, but it appears to be brushed aside. A door to Holly's room is in the right wall. The kitchen door is on the left wall toward the back, and near it, also on the left wall but more toward front of the stage, is the front door exit. In the left front darkened corner there is an indistinct shadowy structure. Although the corners of the stage are darkened, there is no indication of a spotlight at the center where the action is. <br />
<br />
In media which permit it, closeups of facial and figure gesture where appropriate. Gretchen's face is always visible from all viewpoints when the stage is seen in full view and therefore, when the stage is in-the-round, in semi-profile in relation to all four walls. Gretchen sits in livingroom side chair. Three other characters, Chuck, Donna, and Manero all sit roughly in a semi-circle or circle in side chairs facing Gretchen, leaning towards her. There is no other furniture. Holly is in a side room to right of stage. All family characters are very familiar with each other. Gretchen and Holly are relaxed. Others show nervous distress. Speech, gestures and action are performed briskly (allegretto) in an almost mechanical-metronomic, relentless, unbroken rhythmic way. Pauses are a part of, contained in the rhythm of the piece along with the words and the gestures as a single rhythmic movement. Although the words and pauses are in rhythm, they should not seem to verge from plain speaking. There is no actual instrumental music and no actual dancing. Withal it gives a very plain impression.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><strong>Play Opens</strong></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Gretchen sits in a livingroom side chair. Three other characters, Chuck, Donna, and Manero all sit in a semi-circle in side chairs facing Gretchen. </span><br />
<br />
<strong><span style="color: red;">Chuck:</span></strong> Lookat'er. She doesn't do a thing. <br />
<br />
<strong><span style="color: red;">Donna:</span></strong> Just sits there. Chuck, pull your chair in closer so she knows you're watching her. <br />
<br />
<strong><span style="color: red;">Manero:</span></strong> (<em>with distaste</em>) Gretchen. Damn 'er, Lookat'er. She should be ashamed to have us all sit around watching her sit around doing nothing.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Chuck:</span> Last week I worked for four straight hours before suppertime. By that meter's measure I've proved in ten minutes I'm six times her worth. Lookat'er. We have to lose her. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Donna:</span> Chuck, she's staring at me, lookat'er. She's upsetting me with her stare. She's doing it on purpose. Make her stop. Take a lookat'er.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Chuck</span><span style="color: red;">: </span>(<em>to wife, Donna</em>) "Stare"? The significant word is "share." Go on! Take a lookat'er. Is she entitled to a "share"? Our house has always proved its mettle and she is nothing worth. Rude! Obtuse! Our visit won't be long. Let's go to lunch without her. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">All except Gretchen and Holly exit through the front door, leaving Gretchen alone on her chair and Holly in her room. After some moments representing a longer interval (room slowly, slightly, dims), the three visiting relatives make re-entrance through the front door, led by Manero who turns on the electric switch at the front door, making a loud click in the silence. Their voices are inaudible, but they appear to be talking excitedly with energetic gesticulations. There are sounds from shuffling feet, heel clicking, etc., their voices gradually becoming louder, an indecipherable babble which continues as they seat themselves on the chairs, not necessarily in the same order as before. Gretchen's face is always visible. When they are all seated (still babbling and gesturing), Gretchen opens her mouth as if to speak. All hush at once and turn their heads toward her as if expecting her to say something momentous.</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Gretchen:</span> (<em>calmly and matter-of-factly</em>): Would you like some lemonade?<br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Chuck leaps up erect and stiff as if at attention. With outstretched arm so tense that it, and in fact his whole body, quivers as he points a finger at his niece, Gretchen.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Chuck:</span> (<em>shouting</em>) There it is! That's it. That's what made Mother sick. She gave acidic drinks to Mother! <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Manero:</span> And lookat'er. Still sitting. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly:</span> (<em>mellifluous from inside her room)</em> Oh good, your back. Gretchen, put the kettle on for tea. Gretchen, serve the others first with Holland Rusks. Then bring some in to me. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Donna:</span> (wit<em>h surprised voice turning toward Holly's room</em>): Oh! I see it's not yet over. We'll wait. ~ Later.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">The right back corner of the room lightens just enough, subtly, to reveal an ornate burial casket in the corner on the floor of the room.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Donna:</span> (<em>repeating louder toward Holly's room</em>) We'll wait! Later.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Gretch</span><span style="color: red;">en:</span> Grandma, I'll bring you yours now along with fried fish. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Gretchen rises and goes to kitchen, returns with a tray of food. She exits to room where Holly is. During Gretchen's walk, Manero stands up excitedly</span>. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Manero:</span> (<em>to Gretchen</em>): You know your grandma's sick. You know fried fish is bad for her. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">As Manero speaks, Chuck quickly joins in standing. Chuck swivels head back and forth toward the others and points at Gretchen.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Chuck:</span> (<em>sarcastic</em>) Oh, did everybody notice? She fried a tray of groupers. Isn't she industrious! Typical! Anti-social! Only taking care of herself. What did I tell yer? The solicitousness of the pretender. We ought to shake 'er off, lose 'er. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Manero's head bobbing-nods as he sits down.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Manero:</span> (<em>now sitting</em>) And does she feel the labor overworked her? For supper, everyone, let's refuse to eat groupers.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">A second plain pine burial casket appears on the floor next to the first.</span> <br />
<span style="color: blue;">Chuck sits down very erectly and alertly, nostrils flaring, his right arm across his thigh, hand in a fist as if holding a staff. The eyes of Donna and Manero close and open slowly, as if pensive, shaking their heads in sympathy for Grandma Holly.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Gretchen:</span> (<em>heard from inside Holly's room</em>) Grandma, you know I made that fish because it's good for you. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly:</span> Gretchen, I see what's going on. I'm holding it in and I keep it to myself, but I get angry. Gretchen, dessert should be served with only one spoonful of sour cream. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Gretchen re-enters livingroom.</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly:</span> (<em>calling from inside her room</em>): Manero, the fish weren't crispy. Gretchen knows that I like crispy. And she pushed too much sour cream on me. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Manero:</span> I don't like the way this house is being run. Chuck, I think we'll sell 'er. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Chuck:</span> Agreed. We have to sell 'er. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Donna:</span> (<em>excitedly</em>) Lets go and find out what we can get for 'er. How much would she bring in? <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Chuck:</span> Yes, we'll learn its price from our broker. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Holly pitter-patters into livingroom from her bedroom.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly:</span> Chuck, when the house is sold I'll come and live with you. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Manero</span> (<em>To Holly</em>): Holly, I told you that you're sick! Get in your bed, stay in your room, and don't you move out of it. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Holly pitter-patters back to her room.</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Manero </span>(<em>to Gretchen):</em> Gretchen - you're not needed, you go into retirement.<br />
<br />
(<em>to all:)</em> I'll go down the cellar to get the deed and go out the back door to the broker.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Manero walks to first coffin and lifts its lid which serves as the cellar hatch. He climbs down into cellar.</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Gretchen</span>: Where should I go? <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Chuck </span>(<em>To Gretchen</em>): Lookat'er. I don't know where you'll go, not carrying your own weight. You don't prove your mettle. And even now, lookat'er - still sitting. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Chuck</span> (<em>to Donna with evident pride in Donna</em>): Now, Donna, tell to Gretchen what Mother should have for dinner.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Donna stands.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Donna</span> (Speaking to Gretchen): Gretchen, for dinner give her a soft boiled egg and a plain slice of bread through the toaster. Only one egg. Too much protein's a strain. Don't cook it to indigestible hardness. Not too many calories - tea, but no sugar. And nothing sour. Mother should have been given lunch at an earlier hour. Gretchen neglects her. Gretchen, you have a bad effect; you've been too long with her. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">With triumphant expression after speaking, Donna breathes heavily and sits. Chuck puffs up with silent pride, nodding with approval to Donna.</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Manero returns, lifts cellar hatch and listens.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly </span>(<em>from her room</em>): Good, Donna, I want to keep my figure. Gretchen, for dinner a souffle made with but one egg and a single slice of cheese. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Manero</span> (<em>from hatch</em>): Gretchen, you make mother that soft-boiled egg.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly </span>(<em>from her room</em>): Donna, you're a good girl; you have the soft boiled egg.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Donna</span> (<em>calling to Holly</em>): But I'm going out to dinner. (To Chuck): If she doesn't eat the egg, I'll throw it out for her. Gretchen, you're a waster. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Manero:</span> That's just it. And Gretchen's indulgence makes Holly sicker. Holly's diet should be stricter. In Her condition, vegetables only are what's good for her. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly</span> (<em>from inside her room</em>): Vegetables make me bloated and gassy. I eat like a bird. Merely a taster. In fact, I could do without food. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Chuck</span> (lips quivering): That's Mother. Dearly beloved. A self-sacrificer. Lets leave Gretchen with her while we go out to dinner. I'll take the vegetables home when we leave.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Manero gestures from cellar hatch to Donna and Chuck to follow him down.</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Manero</span> (<em>from cellar hatch</em>): The real-estate agent has a ready buyer, a neighbor with an identical house on the other side of the field. We'll meet in his house, sign this one over and then we'll go out to dinner. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Manero</span> ( turning toward Gretchen): You are to be informed by the broker when you must leave. Not yet. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Chuck </span>(calling to Holly as if calling across a canyon): Mother, we're leaving.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Chuck and Donna leave with Manero through the cellar door.</span><br />
<span style="color: blue;">Gretchen sits still on her chair for approx. 20 relaxed, silent seconds. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly</span> (<em>from other room</em>): Well, where are they? <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Gretchen:</span> They've gone to meet at the buyers house. And then they're going out to dinner. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly:</span> They're all grown up and still I have to look after them. It's been years since they've been to these fields and the unmarked paths do meander. <br />
<span style="color: blue;">Holly walks into livingroom.</span> <br />
Follow me. I still remember the way. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Holly and Gretchen leave the stage through cellar hatch.</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">After a few moments Holly and Gretchen come stampeding onto the stage through the front door and look around the room.</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Gretchen:</span> One could scarcely find the path at all, but this must be the place. Amazing, how exactly this room matches ours. Are you sure this house isn't ours? When new, was the furniture part of the sale?<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly:</span> I don't know. These houses are older than me. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Gretchen, moving around, looking, notices there is no cellar hatch.</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Gretchen:</span> Oh, I see. This house is not ours. The furniture is identical, but this one hasn't a cellar. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly:</span> Well then, this one isn't as good. That explains the neighbor's interest in ours. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Gretchen walks to the kitchen.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Gretchen</span> (<em>from the kitchen</em>): Grandma, in the kitchen there's a stair to the basement.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Gretchen returns.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly:</span> I prefer the cellar hatch. When Chuck was small he climbed up and down the hatch and would run in-and-out through the back door. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Gretchen:</span> But now he's not little and he would rather sell. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly:</span> I'll go live with Chuck.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Gretchen:</span> Where should I go?<br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Neighbor opens front door and steps into the room.</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Neighbor:</span> Sorry to barge in like this. I've come here to their house in search of Chuck and Manero. We have an appointment to meet at my house to settle the sale of their property to me. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Gretchen:</span> But this is not their property. Isn't this your house? It's not their house. And this is not our house. We thought it was your house.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Neighbor looks around and up to ceiling in the corner where the cellar was located in the first house.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Neighbor:</span> But this is not my house. (<em>pointing</em>) Look, there's no attic hatch in the ceiling. My house has an attic hatch in the ceiling over there in that corner. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly:</span> We've never had a house with an attic hatch. Do you mean the stairs to the upper floor? <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Neighbor:</span> I have no upper floor in my house. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly:</span> This house has an upper floor. Over there is the stairs.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">The contraption at left front of stage, barely seen before, is now a bit more lit and can be recognized as an open stairway leading to an upper floor.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Neighbo</span><span style="color: red;">r: </span>No hatch! A stairway! No, this house isn't mine. I don't want to be late for the meeting. I'd better go search for my house. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Neighbor walks out through front door, the way he came in.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Gretchen:</span> (<em>to Holly</em>): Will Uncles Manero and Chuck find us? Have we lost our way?<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly:</span> What do you mean "lose our way?" This way will do as well. No point in your fretting about Donna, Chuck or Manero. They'll go out to a restaurant and then they're going home. They don't want to be distressed by you. They won't be coming here. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Gretchen sits down in one of the side chairs.</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly </span>(<em>after a brief pause, shivering</em>): All these doors opening and closing. Gretchen, get yourself up and climb the stairs. Bring me my shawl. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Gretchen rises and walks upstairs. Holly turns and starts to walk to her room.</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Gretchen comes down the stairs, walks over and hands cloak to Holly as Holly continues her walk to her room. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly</span>: But this is not the shawl I want. The shawl I asked for is in a chest, upstairs, in the large bedroom under the bed. Are you too lazy to climb the stairs? <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Gretchen:</span> But Grandma, there were no shawls in the bedrooms. I found it upstairs in the attic. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly</span> (<em>continuing to walk to her room</em>): Up in the attic? <br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">Holly halts for a moment and widens her eyes, puts the cloak on her shoulders and then continues to walk toward her room.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Holly</span>: Well then, it will have to do. Gretchen, stop dawdling. I'll have veal cutlets for supper with spinach in hot sour cream garlic sauce. For dessert, apple tart. Bring it all with a tall lemonade.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Gretchen:</span> It's early. I'll have it ready by seven. <br />
<span style="color: blue;">Gretchen pulls over the hassock and returns to her chair. She puts her feet up on the hassock.</span> <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-1391638465074794032011-07-30T17:32:00.000-04:002011-07-30T17:32:11.921-04:00Here is a bauble which I wrote in the past week:<br />
<br />
<br />
----Roberta<br />
<br />
RESENTMENT - A PARABLE<br />
<br />
Life is really so much more than this. Thus spoke THANE. Yes, agreed THINE, it must be so much more than this.<br />
<br />
If, THINE thought, THANE hadn't witnessed that it was so much more, THANE would not strain to reach that so much more despite THANE's suffering the weakening resentments which impair his lofty commanding attitude, mar his rigid countenance with grimaces, and diminish THANE's strength for hurdling that wall which keeps the so much more out-or-in and keeps THANE from reaching the so-much more in-or-out.<br />
<br />
THANE, always solicitous of THINE's well-being and attempting to assuage that which he felt to be THINE'S overly-emotional grief, instructed THINE thusly: There is no reason for resentment, and therefore have I none. Neither should thee in thy lack of contentment, for I have been up and down this great wide world, which has a length of at least a hundred leagues, and I have seen that overwhelming dissatisfaction envelops all. There is nothing earthly which can be done to change this from the way it is.<br />
<br />
Then THANE proved to thine how much them are able to sit on top of that wall to peer and observe, instructing THINE that as and when THANE looks:<br />
<br />
THANE: <br />
<strong>Hates</strong> sparrows who refuse the dictum, "fall!"<br />
<strong>Hates</strong> women (or would if Thane had any and weren't just pretending)<br />
<strong>Hates</strong> men (or would if Thane had any and weren't just pretending)<br />
<strong>Hates</strong> taxes (although Thane has no money to pay any and has been receiving a pension for superior services rendered at an earlier time, said time being nothing and nowhere good.)<br />
<strong>Hates</strong> government (in which, once, all walked about freely but in which each and every Thane found hampering Thane's freedom to boss around each and every other Thane and Thine.) <br />
<br />
Thus, proved THANE, there is no cause for resentment for there is no more than this so-much-less-than-life anywhere or anyhow and I have seen it all.<br />
<br />
Then THINE, being of multifaceted questioning and thus more inclined to the dependent simplicities of those who ask many questions of others, queried: "If there's nothing so-much-more beyond that wall, and nothing so-much-more here or then, where was or is Life so much more than this?" <br />
<br />
THANE and THINE pondered. Then THINE suggested guardedly that they ask THUSLY for an opinion. THANE summarily but tenderly replied, thou knowest I am wary of the opinion of clerical scholars. THINE, in defense of THINE'S own suggestion, answered, "But thou hast the greatness to resist those suggestions as would offer danger or offense." THANE replied, "Oh but it's not about myself that I worry. I fear such influence on thee." "THINE, with long piercing glance at THANE, answered "Thou art the THANE. I am THINE. Fear not. We will learn together what is good for overcoming dissatisfaction." <br />
<br />
So THANE called upon THUSLY and explained the despondency suffered by THANE and THINE, reminding all THUSLY sternly that THUSLY must tell to them, if THUSLY knowest what's good for them, in a way pleasant to the understanding of THANE and THINE who were not as learned as THUSLY. <br />
<br />
THUSLY then dutifully called together all the clericals and secretaries and upon reaching the wall, THUSLY, nervous to answer among such elevated company as THANE and THINE, spoke as follows, "Seldom are we brought to speak in such magnified company but we will speak justly, in a forthright manner lest ye believe that we, who serve faithfully in hardship and threat of every kind, are cowardly to face bravely the ears of THANE and THINE. We do value our lives highly, and though this subject holds danger, we will humbly submit our answer as is suitable to our station, begging ye of sufferance." <br />
<br />
Then THUSLY, focusing attention over the wall at all the mistakes of THANE's and THINE's dissatisfied neighbors over all the earth of at least a hundred leagues, discussed simply, as was suitable to THUSLY's position, where or when life is, was, or could be better: <br />
<br />
"Maybe, said THUSLY modestly, if SWAGBAG gaped in wonder into a microscope instead of at the number of glittering facets on a neighbors brooch or if THEYSAY pondered how it is that both Adam and Eve have the same number of ribs and did both or either of them at any time, before or after Genesis, have an uneven or unfair number? Or in other words, wondered about the force that made us exist this side of the wall where, once in a while, something good comes up--- <br />
Maybe then."<br />
<br />
"Maybe, if PUSH shoved notes or colors around to make compositions instead of forcing persons into patterns not of their own choosing or SHOVE pushed words or numbers around instead of trying to redeploy persons away from their own interests into SHOVE'S services--- <br />
Maybe then."<br />
<br />
"Maybe if TURN YOUR BACK AND WALK AWAY would say "What did you say just then?" to WHY DON'T YOU SPEAK WITH ME and if TURN pointed out the constellations in the night sky to SPEAK as they walk side-by-side in the fields and SPEAK explains to TURN as they walk side-by-side in the fields, how the color of flowers sometimes depends on the nutrients in the soil--- <br />
Maybe then."<br />
<br />
"Maybe if PIN MONEY's earnings were allowed to grow into sawbucks and MONEY BELT noticed that that didn't actually cut a midriff in the bonds of holy matrimony and MONEY BELT thereby escaped having to put in overtime and began attending the drama alongside SAWBUCKS and SAWBUCKS began having the time to gnaw hotdogs alongside MONEY BELT at the Sport Stadium because MONEY BELT washed the floor while SAWBUCKS did the laundry--- <br />
Maybe then."<br />
<br />
"Maybe if I'LL BE DAMNED IF I'LL CONTINUE TO WASTE ALL MY ENERGIES IN A KITCHEN and I'LL BE DAMNED IF I'LL SPEND <strong><em>ANY </em></strong>OF MY ENERGIES IN A KITCHEN come to new terms of agreement, Nature will reveal the answer that lay beyond the wonder of Agur, pious liege of Great Solomon, who lamented in proverbs submitted to Solomon, that after the "ship in the midst of a sea," Agur understood not "the way of a man with a woman." Then ALL and ANY, with Nature's mystery revealed, and seeing eye to eye with new regard, might find themselves emerging into new sensibilities, making goo goo eyes at one another as he dries the dishes (which is really unnecessary because air-dried is more hygienic. But hell! Life isn't all hygiene.)--- <br />
Maybe then. <br />
<br />
<div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-35498572329796644712011-07-10T16:57:00.002-04:002011-07-27T17:14:22.795-04:00July 10, 2011<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG_p3sJjuaXcE8MPHqzv9I05vBMYGnQ5-KT_XoXXNnf0sWfvtqwt4SJYH5Jbc5MjoJtAbl8GFdyZyGmIeA2bcgNEKQPBNoSgKlIxA8yfBYQqqc-BYt-6e61ExqWm4eY0XZjcde_Eeg52W-/s1600/Storage+-+FLATTENED+-++Moralistic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG_p3sJjuaXcE8MPHqzv9I05vBMYGnQ5-KT_XoXXNnf0sWfvtqwt4SJYH5Jbc5MjoJtAbl8GFdyZyGmIeA2bcgNEKQPBNoSgKlIxA8yfBYQqqc-BYt-6e61ExqWm4eY0XZjcde_Eeg52W-/s320/Storage+-+FLATTENED+-++Moralistic.jpg" t$="true" width="241" /></a></div><br />
Sorry this month's post was delayed. On the way I was cut off by a herd of playing interlopes. <br />
<br />
Here is a poem and its illustration which I had started a few years ago. The poem is based on actual events to which I was witness, but I gave it a title which ties it to some well-known historical events and links it to the song The Battle Hymn of the Republic. I dropped both poem and illustration and let them lie fallow for many months. I returned to both these past few weeks. They were started at the same time and finished together today. <br />
<br />
I would like to remind readers that pictures, like poems are metaphorical. At this event there actually was no punching (sorta*). <br />
*A slang word with a connotation of "metaphorical."<br />
<br />
I hope everyone had a jubilant 4th of July. <br />
<br />
-------Roberta<br />
<br />
<br />
Roberta SchulbergGoro<br />
MORALISTICS - THE SONG OF THE JUBILANT BALLADEER<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<br />
"I tend to be moralistic. <br />
"My mouthings annoy <br />
"As if I hadn't the right to speak." <br />
"You think you've earned the right to speak?"<br />
"I'm not sure I've earned the right, but I know I've got it."<br />
"A right to as-you-will, tendentious dogmatic ranting?"<br />
"Sure."<br />
"And you consider your provocations moral?"<br />
"Yeah."<br />
<br />
"Curmudgeon, teaching for teaching, we'll even the score. <br />
"We'll hand you our tutelage and pin on you your shame. <br />
"We'll teach you how such "free" speech feels.<br />
"Our lessons can shut you up."<br />
"Now, Do you still persist in self-opinionated prattle, off-the-cuff, do-it-yourself moralistics?"<br />
"Yeah."<br />
"Eccentric spates, make-shift, biased, extemporaneous didactics?" <br />
"Sure."<br />
<br />
"Scold, think about it. Your conscience. Are you good?"<br />
"I'm moral. But not good. <br />
"For example, I went for days not washing the kitchen floor. <br />
"My wages don't swell me with pride in welcome partaking with others. <br />
"I don't run for the phone, I let the answer machine to do it <br />
"An obvious lack of personal attention inconveniencing the caller. <br />
"I haven't chosen a nursing profession or other such public service, <br />
"So I know I'm not endearingly good."<br />
"Still claiming to be moral?" <br />
"Sure." <br />
"Advising ideosyncratic moralistics?"<br />
"Yeah."<br />
<br />
"Think you're better than others?" <br />
"No more than anyone else."<br />
"We know how to cut you down until you know you're worse." <br />
"Now do you feel better?" <br />
"No, I'm feeling worse." <br />
"Still challenging doctrines more daunting? <br />
"Sure." <br />
"Prating moralistics?" <br />
"Yeah." <br />
<br />
"You're not humble." <br />
"Yes, I know." <br />
"We'll beat you 'til you're humble and recognize your place; <br />
"Until you're broken and brought to the edge of the grave." <br />
"See that place?" <br />
"My eyes are open." <br />
"Still spouting contrived moralistics?"<br />
"Sure." <br />
Self-willful speech is moral?" <br />
"Yeah."<br />
<br />
"Continuing public diatribes?" <br />
"Silencing splits tribes, not speech. <br />
"More sustaining than false harmony is contest in dispute. <br />
"Those who silence opinion despise their world <br />
"And their world love THEM it don't!" <br />
"Love THEM 'it don't' and your moral?" <br />
"Sure." <br />
"Not love THEM, who shepherd the world?"<br />
"Yeah, but neither are they silenced.<br />
"It's those not enfolded in love who force silence, denying reciprocant ear. <br />
"Yeah. It's speech heard that girds reciprocant ears." <br />
<br />
<div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-88514480893470687072011-06-01T15:07:00.000-04:002011-06-01T15:07:09.536-04:00The Legend of Big MouthHappy June, 2011<br />
<br />
<br />
This month's post needs another week or two to complete. I'll tell you about it when we get there, but to keep our beginning-of-the-month's appointment, here is a cartoon I did way back in 2007. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMOivGsI55_dY-SJRz5M0cKwFXpEYD8-FRGy0qU2_2l93TPBslKmNf_5pQ7yCMqaCVi86HnDOkQ9YuEvyxhO0uzb-49OU6GhuPnquZkEwUQwJJVCEfHLPxni36Z8mPFPxC7xWOHROh9dFu/s1600/My+-+what+a+big+mouth+you+have.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMOivGsI55_dY-SJRz5M0cKwFXpEYD8-FRGy0qU2_2l93TPBslKmNf_5pQ7yCMqaCVi86HnDOkQ9YuEvyxhO0uzb-49OU6GhuPnquZkEwUQwJJVCEfHLPxni36Z8mPFPxC7xWOHROh9dFu/s320/My+-+what+a+big+mouth+you+have.jpg" t8="true" width="318" /></a></div>--- Roberta<div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-4836593700455160492011-04-30T11:28:00.010-04:002011-04-30T11:34:39.676-04:00This was written this April, 2011<br />
<br />
<strong>LIEF</strong><br />
<br />
She was but six when she turned a leaf<br />
To show me her first writings.<br />
My well-loved child wrote of spinning drifts of leaves<br />
On windy corners when we took ~together<br />
To her school, our wintery weather city walks.<br />
<br />
I was all delight in praise, <br />
But soon she closed her book to me, <br />
Withdrawing with her schoolmates to a turbulance of secrecy.<br />
The whirl was palpable that funnelled her from me<br />
In tight-lipped partial leaving <br />
Following her school's "Abjure ivory towers; socialization is the key,"<br />
Which she took to mean "Focus on classmate socializing in after-school and weekend party revelry."<br />
<br />
My child's spirit wafted away when she was only ten.<br />
Only a floundering child still, when she fluttered from the stem.<br />
After many years of probe and search in the torque of time's multiplex turbine <br />
We met again. <br />
Just briefly.<br />
And that was when, <br />
With shoulder shrug, hand brushing the air, her breezy answer was given; <br />
She said, "I doubt we can live in the same city together" and did leave again.<div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-34960274573481713582011-03-30T22:46:00.000-04:002011-03-30T22:46:00.903-04:003-30-2011<br />
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">I've been ill, but I'm feeling much better now. Here is the illustration for DRAGON OF REALITY which I had hoped to be done last month, but am relieved to have finished it today.</div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimgRXAK5YQyEFL9MMP8oG9AwLABZYC7YP9Co9h_gnnV2wNznP9n6z5CDjpcRYYyc97jmuj4bAJ5vcVTO0xD6fWCiFatugmxZAzyoCvaURmduJxTsj0za9bttqwk5T6J93qkGYvL74FG2_8/s1600/Illustration+for+DRAGON+OF+REALITY.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" r6="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimgRXAK5YQyEFL9MMP8oG9AwLABZYC7YP9Co9h_gnnV2wNznP9n6z5CDjpcRYYyc97jmuj4bAJ5vcVTO0xD6fWCiFatugmxZAzyoCvaURmduJxTsj0za9bttqwk5T6J93qkGYvL74FG2_8/s400/Illustration+for+DRAGON+OF+REALITY.jpg" width="301" /><br />
<br />
<br />
When I was still in Brooklyn (before 1983,) I wrote directly on the wall of my workroom the words "The Dragon of Reality" as a reminder to me of the effect I wanted to work toward in my paintings (work was all Liquitex Paint then). I wanted the work to have the effect of giving the familiar the exotic strangeness of jungle birds or neon fish because seen freshly. This is a recent poem written in recollection of that time and that even-more-exotic-though-present-everywhere dragon. <br />
<br />
Do I seem strange?<br />
<br />
THE DRAGON OF REALITY<br />
<br />
Lacework trestled membranes stretch lattice netted wingspread.<br />
Multicolored mien fierce twines whisker coiled barbels.<br />
Phthalocyan green skin bares cadmium claws deep red. <br />
Is.<br />
The Flamboyant Dragon Of Reality. <br />
<br />
<br />
Opalescent scales flash, flaunt rainbow dappled, pied discs. <br />
Res extensa breathes, springs, res cogitan wills, impels. <br />
Disconcerting might flames, elongated tail flicks. <br />
Am.<br />
Phosphorescent Dragon Of Reality.<br />
<br />
<br />
Encompasser of all time. Stark. Incarnation of all space.<br />
Imperious mandate. Claims. Necessitant lash compels. <br />
Urgent exigent, staunch. Harsh. Fervid is-am of must face. <br />
Wills.<br />
Inescapable - The Dragon Of Reality<br />
<br />
Not o'erspreading umbrel, arch, astride of grace, fates.<br />
It IS the scene, heat, breath, sense. Vitality propels.<br />
Mobius strip serpent, winds. Cortege enfolded pulsates.<br />
Grips.<br />
Convoluted perplex - The Dragon of Reality<br />
<br />
Foresight's fiery hope, goad. Muse. Hindsight's lashing tail, dour.<br />
Actuater of urge, qualm. Looms. Insistent spur of onus, revels.<br />
Quotidean zealot. Glum. Spendthrift ebullience, joy, awe.<br />
Prods.<br />
<br />
Unsettling Dragon - Grim Resplendent, Shifter, Sifter, Stringent Startler - Reality<br />
<br />
</a><div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-13959526152045554962011-02-07T11:32:00.000-05:002011-02-07T11:32:23.748-05:00I haven't finished the illustration for DRAGON OF REALITY yet; I estimate another ten days. Meanwhile, here is something I just jotted down the other day: <br />
<br />
Roberta SchulbergGoro<br />
<br />
2-4-11<br />
<br />
I LIKE THIS DEVELOPMENT<br />
<br />
I like the way she struts in as if to say<br />
"You don't know how much you'd have to look up to me if you knew."<br />
I like the way she doesn't know I know.<br />
<br />
Gone is sadness at her hostility caused by her "deprivation."<br />
Gone is feeling need to protect her vulnerability,<br />
And best, no longer must I be concerned to consider the inconsiderate in future plans.<br />
<br />
I like it because a scornful laugh evolved while facing her scorning midlife maturity‑‑-<br />
Because she doesn't want me to know and doesn't want to tell me <br />
'Though all her friends are in the know (with she not knowing all my friends are in the know)<br />
Because her generation does not rest on our shoulders nor follow in our train nor reach into our pocketbooks <br />
But wants to bump us off <br />
(our perch) <br />
In the ignorant assumption that such little monkeys as she will be around longer and be in longer need<br />
(Having been born without the sin of Eden though firmly set in sins of territory)<br />
And therefore sieze a twig at the pinnacle (woops too high to swing a foot at our heads)<br />
Instead of a sturdy long limb of effort.<div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-80600882339033768942010-11-02T16:41:00.006-04:002011-02-07T12:35:49.611-05:00Here is the finished LAMENT FOR LOST SONGS. <br />
<br />
November 2, 2010<br />
<br />
This is a poem that tells, means. Archibald Mac Leish wrote "A poem should not mean but be." But I wanted to tell about something on my mind which I myself have witnessed. It "bees," but "be"? I have settled some things in my mind while writing it, including questions of what, in poetry, I want to continue to do, to drop, to change, or to newly attempt. <br />
<br />
Paul Valery wrote: "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." But I don't at this time intend to abandon it. It might reappear some time in the future looking a lot different except for the "good parts."<br />
<br />
~~~~Roberta<br />
<br />
<strong>LAMENT FOR LOST SONGS</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong>By Roberta Schulberg Goro</strong><br />
<br />
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2Iv_abyAIql-J4fqdZs0sGWX5CXJGhHIZz5RDIzd4lAZo7GuMKUpDmCH2QdEW57xAYx0mqaHU39M1sKQAo1XaPb2OAV1yLv1U3v1lYavx07cSXfzk2BXvBonBZvvPy89QvMH6SH15mvqw/s1600/For+Poem+-+Blog+Second+-+Lost+SongsFLATTENED.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" nx="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2Iv_abyAIql-J4fqdZs0sGWX5CXJGhHIZz5RDIzd4lAZo7GuMKUpDmCH2QdEW57xAYx0mqaHU39M1sKQAo1XaPb2OAV1yLv1U3v1lYavx07cSXfzk2BXvBonBZvvPy89QvMH6SH15mvqw/s320/For+Poem+-+Blog+Second+-+Lost+SongsFLATTENED.png" width="142" /></a>They shift through wavering shadows along the worlds' plicated folds,</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Gruff between the pleats of human passage, </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Enshrouders of old sung tales, silencing the not yet told.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Sidling in withdrawal, abhorrent of oppositions, scowling where multiplicity of voice is permitted,</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">They skulk, </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Withdrawn, </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Fearing to sound their own names</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">And enamored of restricting domination,</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Carry dreams so newly pernicious, they thrill at daring to commit them. </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><span style="color: #45818e;"> First of all, such silencing is not new.</span></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">It was done by dynasties of Egyptians,</span></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">By ancient Greeks. In Europe by Christians. </span></div><span style="color: #45818e;"></span><br />
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Second. We have already won freedom of speech and religion. </span></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">You want credit now for the glory of old battles. </span></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">No valor this, just a repetition.</span></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">But silencing others remains subsistent. </div>Suppressive schemes to clasp control continue persistent in<br />
Separate groups outside of government.<br />
Falsified fact, half-truths, misrepresented views of rivals<br />
Cause loathing disregard of slandered, act as censor of those libeled.<br />
Sub-rosa activists jolt retraction from opposing-conscienced resistants, <br />
Who cower to silence by intimidating insistence. <br />
<br />
Autocratic domineering,<br />
Impeding speech, barring hearing,<br />
Organized societal estrangements,<br />
Wily monopolistic arrangements,<br />
Unscrupulous games played cruelly<br />
For personal gain and supremacy,<br />
Decadence despite idealistic legality, <br />
Cursèd shortcuts to unearned mastery.<br />
<br />
~ And new times invent new tactics.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Law's procedures prevent hindrance to retort.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Government is the surest resort.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div>But law redresses outrage after the outraged sue. <br />
Assuming that discovery's timely, <br />
Will maligned have resources to carry through?<br />
Have shunned the social connections needed for rebuttle of <br />
Misrepresentations, guileful, subtle? <br />
<br />
~Not everything is government control~ <br />
Or should new times invent new tactics? <br />
Ought authority forestall distortion, hate-creating practics <br />
By placing prying guards in ubiquitous patrol? <br />
Should it create a fearing silence as avoids controversial mention<br />
And with such fears nullify its own free speech protection?<br />
If what we forfend becomes our favor we ourselves transmute to other <br />
And give accord to overmastering subjection. <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;"> Your anxiety is feckless. </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Schemers, rare, not likely to be reckless.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Fear of disclosure is tort restrained! </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Avoiding disgrace, serenity's maintained! </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div>Fear-- But their world begins in fear - is fear. <br />
And it's fear that makes them tyrant<br />
Should their brittle cosmos of preconceptions be disturbed and<br />
They press back if, <br />
In abrupt encounter with the bustling gyrant,<br />
By miscalculated strategy, <br />
Shifts of time, <br />
Or turns in the road, <br />
They are startled to meet exuberance of<br />
Clacking tongues, <br />
Uplifted arms, <br />
Clapping hands <br />
And tambourines, <br />
Rhythmic stomps of varied step,<br />
Syncopate songsters, <br />
Recounters of tales,<br />
Weavers of intricate bands of color,<br />
Clamorers of what they know <br />
And in the telling, telling clear <br />
A dissonant contrapuntal melody <br />
Of doctrines diverse and actions contradictory. <br />
<br />
Uneasy in consideration of the anarchic array of differences, <br />
They edge through the narrow containing furrows,<br />
Around assemblies of colorful bustling boroughs,<br />
Disdaining the pageant on display, perturbed at guileless candid references.<br />
<br />
But they do not go away.<br />
<br />
They skitter in a safety which is clandestine to <br />
Observe in anonym the drubbings, meetings, trades and orations, <br />
Scurrying close to the rim of the dividing ruts of corrugations, <br />
The partitioning clefts between the congregations,<br />
Hating whatever is not somber, <br />
Searching for reasons to censure.<br />
Or quivering at their own daredevil malevolence,<br />
Dart into folds pretending adherence<br />
To defame outside ethos or stance. <br />
<br />
Eyeing folds of endeavor, enthusiasm or exertion, <br />
They circuit,<br />
Silent, <br />
Unless with short inward breath, <br />
They halt, <br />
Shocked at ecstatic song's or fevered story's protrusion from its origin,<br />
It's unaccustomed sort of light past boundaries of it's own division<br />
Of broad cosmology or utilitarian pragmatism.<br />
They goad each other gnashing at the whooping young they come upon<br />
Whose sharp elbows and supple-ankled feet protrude from jumbles of ruckus and jump-rope song, <br />
And silence with brief barbed words the cackles of the scathing, droll, multiplexic old found sauntering on byroads the winnowers tread along<br />
Abashing constructs articulated beyond the firm division each belongs to, <br />
Outraged umbrage brushing those wayside or crossing over <br />
Into convenient folds which confirm one-or-another preconception of the hour,<br />
Self-appointed sanctimony putting "in their place" everyone who they run into.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Your simplistic, over-heated flouting of authority merely</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Describes those acting paternally</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">To block disruption of that clement conformity which </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Secures every disparate disciplined boundary.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Understand this </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Conflict in ethos' can cause panic </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Confusion confronting the anarchic.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">I doubt false reports goad to reject. </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">It's that the majority, </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Naive and uncircumspect,</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Give to none but familiar concepts respect.</span></div><br />
It's not the government's authority but private impulse to weaken that seeks cordoned narrowing to witless. <br />
A paternal authority who extends broad witness <br />
Diminishes enfeebling ignorance, <br />
Encourages sagaciousness.<br />
It's not the majority, but the tyrants of conformity <br />
Who anger at conceptual disturbance.<br />
<br />
Tyrants hate the free play<br />
Of minds they can't manipulate, <br />
Prefer lives forged through fright, docile to obey, <br />
Though irrelevant to law's decree, anyone's demand <br />
Adults, their spirits folded neat like laundry on a sidestand.<br />
<br />
Obedience itself is the new tyrants' veneration,<br />
Regardless of particular tradition,<br />
Funneling mavericks into convenient railed-off pens of custom <br />
Roughly fitting a salient trait marked as temperament's token<br />
Or as a partial ethnic configuration of the formerly unbranded, now to be newly broken. <br />
<br />
Throughout a childhood longer than other earthly creatures,<br />
Human's with difficulty imbibe ready concepts of society and nature.<br />
But tyrants limit compass of that unfathomed world in which we all are insecure, <br />
Stifling mental receptivity among those no longer immature.<br />
<br />
Although alike physically, <br />
We are immensely different ethnically,<br />
Never hardened to a species specific way. <br />
Time's cogencies leads us aware through transformation,<br />
Yielding insight beyond our custom's earlier conformation.<br />
<br />
And concealments will not prevent alterations.<br />
And distortions will warp contemporary custom's re-configurations.<br />
<br />
Now ~ since acrobatic reckonings disport unceasingly within the mind,<br />
Eager hearsay's glossing gossips of a barriered actuality<br />
Arouse unnerving chimeras of vivid irreality, <br />
Narrowed insular intellect accepting as tuition <br />
Unwitnessable tales of personage or tradition. <br />
And folds which, among their own kind, <br />
Repress the transparent, incandescent eidolons<br />
That skim in tandem with our alert quotidian minds, <br />
Which delimit the intricate formation of conjectures wrought<br />
By meticulously measured, abstract, formalizing thought,<br />
Shrivel among their own the innate, mentally agile, specifically human delight of such venture,<br />
Molding out of a plenary human being a sullen, anguished, lower creature,<br />
Subjugating such limited beings of the fold to the fold's limiting intimidator.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Again you're caught up in glorious old history </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">This time the battle against slavery.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Adults in unsatisfactory happenstance</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Have the right to leave and take their chance</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">On finding some unknown, some superior circumstance.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div>But this is not about lapse in enforcing the constitution.<br />
It's about unregenerate private passion <br />
The will to dominate and control without argument or limitation,<br />
A competitive sport, played only for the winning. <br />
A match of rise, gloat, and score. <br />
It's a psychology lesson.<br />
<br />
Now, inside the martinets maneuver distrust of outside innocence,<br />
Their shakey allegations swaying swelling ranks of ignorance.<br />
~ Or they pose a strategy of detachment, <br />
Marshalling unguided trust in viciousness<br />
With a dangerous tokenism of permissiveness as examplar of restrained tolerance,<br />
Withholding information to that same walled-around ignorance. <br />
<br />
To be in their good graces requires ready assent to implication <br />
That giving ear outside the group exhibits traitorous collaboration. <br />
Nods are flashed toward scholar or casual reader as addenda to insinuation. <br />
Then shunned are those of questionable convictions, <br />
Avoided now are unfavored commitments.<br />
Done casually, coolly, in unofficial manner, unsubjected to court's rigor and without interrogator, they proceed without ruth.<br />
Can a persuasive minority obscure truth?<br />
Will a groveling majority evade integrity's truth?<br />
<br />
In groupings of enthusiasms like art, history or philosophy,<br />
Contrivers, stalwart in beneficence to their protégés, <br />
Diminish difficulties of age-old thorny complexities <br />
By devoted doctoring of ancient works according to current sophistries.<br />
They simplify, re-interpret, conceal, enhance and restructure,<br />
Recasting work, artist, and antecedent culture,<br />
Peremptorily filling (as they see it) the needs of present circumstance.<br />
Disaffected members of the group, noting the general lack of substance<br />
(Hardly enough for the little grip of infants), <br />
Lose interest, or feign enrapture in obeisance.<br />
And then again, associates of small but effective power in key positions,<br />
For example, small township librarians, <br />
Principals of religions, <br />
College historians, <br />
Others not under Library of Congress restrictions, <br />
Can eradicate or disarrange new and ancient compositions,<br />
Zealous villagers spread irate "stamp out" proscriptions <br />
From town to town like a virulent disease link, <br />
Insiders self-segregating from what more distant towns think.<br />
<br />
We are a wonder to ourselves.<br />
Grasp of our unique sapience<br />
Rounds through astonished cognizance <br />
Of our own culture's countenance<br />
In contrast with epoch or locale gaped at from a distance.<br />
Insight ignites when our imagination<br />
Envisions long past or distant invention <br />
In intertwined apposition with paradigms of our own, <br />
Initial reflective formulations warning or inspiring of a potentiality <br />
Portending turpitude or a transcendent turn in history.<br />
A weighty portion of self-knowledge is lost with loss of any ethnology.<br />
<br />
But self-segregaters stop, shun, and slander singers of another song.<br />
Contradiction holds to silence keeping place among the throng.<br />
Peripheral opinion lowers eyelids, shrugs, backs off from surrounding audit,<br />
Repeats "They said it's not good," represses further thought.<br />
Inside only silence, fearing and insensate.<br />
Outside, only cynosures for hate.<br />
Underpinnings between the folds disintegrate. <br />
The overall purpose? Gamesmanship in the sport of DIVIDE AND CONQUER.<br />
Assisted by those reared to acquiesce, manipulators have set the gaggle into positions of controllable order. <br />
And the strong minded are, in the silence, made ready for insurgent uncontrollable disaster.<br />
<br />
It happened many times in history, <br />
Lovers of homogeneity,<br />
Condescenders and iconclasts<br />
Destroy a civilization and its recorded past.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">And just how do you expect to legislate</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">Against a frenzy which initiates</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #45818e;">In sectors that are private?</span></div><span style="color: #45818e;"><br />
</span>I don't. We already have the legislation.<br />
What's needed is extension of societal education<br />
Raising everyone to a condition of sophistication.<br />
<br />
In adversarial record don't destroy even comma or apostrophe, <br />
Yet, in your own name, stand forth to disagree.<br />
<br />
Group or person, be known by honest friends of forthright discipline<br />
So if ever you suffer need for defense, you among the just will win.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #b45f06;">I've been listening and I prefer whatever is the safer decision </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #b45f06;">Those not choosing sides in refutation,</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #b45f06;">Or clamoring in disputation,</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #b45f06;">Not interposing, countering, making or taking the trouble,</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #b45f06;">Won't find themselves calling and clambering in some aftermath of rubble.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
<span style="color: #351c75;">That speaker sounds to me like one of experience. </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #351c75;"> No hazards for minding one's own business.</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #351c75;"> Ride your bike, sow your garden, </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #351c75;"> Not get lost in altercating diz zi n ~</span></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"></span></div><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"></div><br />
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-54628652020880672882010-07-30T14:55:00.008-04:002010-07-30T15:13:49.722-04:00Argument Between Pompous and FacetiaHere is one of mine which was printed in "Hello Poetry" online magazine. Since writers maintain all rights when published there, I decided to use it for this month's New Potpourri.<br />
<br />
--Roberta<br />
<br />
Roberta SchulbergGoro<br />
Written March 6, 2008<br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">Argument between Pompous and Facetia</span></div><br />
<span style="color: red; font-size: large;">Pompous:</span><br />
"Oh God, no, not another shallow rhymer,<br />
fitting each word to its neat little place.<br />
Oh God, no, not another painterly composition<br />
with planal directions going round and around or leading that way and this.<br />
They did that in the past; get to the new.<br />
Make sure the reader or viewer knows that the masterful<br />
knows more than than the masterful lets <strike>through</strike> out.<br />
Disdain extenuating weakenings caused by straining for clarity <br />
or unnecessary exertions in expressions of cohesion.<br />
Words, though plain, arouse astonished wonder by nonchalant impenetrable shufflings.<br />
Be clued-in, be bold, be tough and show it when you sculpt the clay.<br />
When shaped, use your trowel to scratch the surface conjuring even more obscurity.<br />
Toss it off in broad strokes of masterful negligence. <br />
Be above the miniscule.<br />
By these means show in shadowy hints the profundity that winks beyond merely ordinary restrictions.<br />
Break the barriers, fly the constructive. Those old shackles lie about the world.<br />
Show you ain't no conforming sissy. <br />
Display in impatient referenceless strokes<br />
Your forceful awareness of the world as known."<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: blue;"> </span><span style="color: red;">Facetia:</span> </span><br />
"Oh? <br />
<div style="text-align: center;">Such a world as shows no evidence of form and structure in living creatures; </div><div style="text-align: center;">no effortful eons of evolution.</div><div style="text-align: center;">Forests have no ecology and laws of nature are not binding.</div><div style="text-align: center;">Mind never happened, spirit's a farce,</div><div style="text-align: center;">unions only expedient plottings.</div><div style="text-align: center;">Lessons of history describe the disruptive;</div><div style="text-align: center;">it's what you grab and who you club;</div><div style="text-align: center;">others are only take or be taken.</div><div style="text-align: center;">Show 'em who's boss,</div><div style="text-align: center;">stash it away,</div><div style="text-align: center;">it's dog eat dog until there's nothing.</div><div style="text-align: center;">Shake it all up; break it all up.</div><div style="text-align: center;">It's only entropy."</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-18440334084924004042010-06-26T12:40:00.002-04:002011-02-07T12:16:25.721-05:00<em><strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">Here are two larks of mine.</span></strong></em><br />
---Roberta<br />
<br />
This one I placed in the "comments" section of the online Journal "<strong>Tinywords."</strong> <br />
June 22, 2010<br />
<br />
<div>Title: <strong>WEEKEND HYMNAL AT GROUP HOUSE</strong><br />
Cook riffles pages </div><div>chantarelles roll into bowl</div>scents ascend, risers stir<br />
door's soprano hinges swing<br />
pitpat scramble, altos yumm <br />
<br />
<br />
<div></div> Here's one I placed in a personal Blog, unfortunately now disappeared, in answer to the problem "Write a story in one sentence."<br />
July 24, 2009<br />
<strong>ONE LINE STORY</strong><br />
While staring at a melody and hearing a blaring tattoo of light, alarmed technicians threatened communications shutdown as the computer, in defending itself against desynthesizers, reconnoitered non-surrender and locked entry into T.P. Alley.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-46207930594829816922010-05-29T13:42:00.003-04:002010-05-29T13:52:36.474-04:00Written 5-25-07<br />
By Roberta SchulbergGoro<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><strong>Ode to Vinegar</strong></span><br />
(<strong><span style="font-size: large;">How the modern world won the war against the plague of scurvy)</span></strong><br />
<br />
The doctor said the surest cure brings more pain than the disease.<br />
Cramp in pith and sting in pelt by wine and sours lengthily ease,<br />
But stiffening ranks of stench still feast on obese flesh, <br />
As counter-attacking mites within avenge the withering of their mesh.<br />
The spotted skin erupts in curvilinear bloody splits<br />
Where electric flashing flesh its stony-ball diseases spits.<br />
While protein, carrots, careful nurture, lift intruders to the fleece<br />
To spew on all the situation 'round dead muck of microbes in release.<div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-22827519607394966552010-04-30T11:56:00.004-04:002011-03-30T22:56:23.823-04:00Dualism is a Never Ending BattleBy Roberta SchulbergGoro<br />
<br />
In the semi-sunlight, I squinted at a black-striped stone I never before noticed,<br />
rooted and still, <br />
close to a clump of grasses near the bank, <br />
as the slow, drifting, artificial canal gently rippled around it. <br />
<br />
But it must have moved, <br />
like a clock invisibly, <br />
for soon I saw it was free of the grasses, <br />
moving with the drift southward and into the center of the basin. <br />
As it passed by me, <br />
I saw the mustard-colored stone was a yellow-backed sea turtle, <br />
the stripe a fresh-water baby alligator eight inches long, its tail into the water. <br />
<br />
The snappy party, alien to this technological water, moved passively with the stream, <br />
floating slowly toward the exposed ledge of dangling toes at the far end of the sculpted cove, and<br />
toward the pumping machinery of the now scarce-used swimming pool<br />
which had recently undergone a renovation, <br />
its sunning deck now protected from a sun shower with <br />
a thickly thatched, gabled roof of reeds placed, they said,<br />
in honor of the new Hawaiian president.<div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-68213936969869284052010-04-30T11:33:00.003-04:002010-05-06T10:09:50.500-04:00Pandora's Box,(The Electronic Poetry Magazine)<br />
By Roberta SchulbergGoro<br />
<br />
Unbound,<br />
Sprung from the box,<br />
Upward fluttering <br />
Hazy penumbra hovering<br />
<br />
In flight transforming to aureole, <br />
Delineations at center sharpening, <br />
Definition to edge widening. <br />
Zooming view into revelations:<br />
The segmented spaces of a stranger's thought. <br />
<br />
A new one every lifting of the lid <br />
As promised by the technology magician, the salesman saying,<br />
"This one's not much. The box itself plain and unadorned. <br />
"But you're not paying much; <br />
You can buy it for a song." <br />
<br />
I wanted it. <br />
A pandora's box, <br />
Skills an angry Zeus hid from the presumption of Prometheus, <br />
Revealed only one-by-one<br />
When Patriarchal anger relents to forgiveness of prematurely stolen fire:<br />
Brainstorm, <br />
Lustrous flairing enlightenment<div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-31592062552846723912010-03-27T19:59:00.000-04:002010-04-30T11:37:23.248-04:00The Old Enclave Folkadir - Part I by Roberta SchulbergGoroRoberta SchulbergGoro <br />
Started - September, 2007<br />
Finished - March, 2010<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">The Old Enclave Folkadir</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I. Motion</span><br />
<br />
As if there were a world. As if it could be met. As if there were a congruence between a rag of a newspaper and a rag of existence. There is no congruence. There is no hope. There are only lies. <br />
<br />
As if there were a congruence between an idea about living still traceable in the architecture of old buildings and the remnants of a world, now fossilized, which still exists in them. There is no congruence. There is no world.<br />
<br />
The scene through the apartment's kitchen window is a drab ostentation. The mummers on the pavement below move awkwardly, seeming to take stage direction for their exaggerated motions in flagrant missions of display, straining to appear to onlookers as icons of a still living world. But they don't convince; no world is evident or evoked. No people really live here. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNn_FSmRz9iCo_v_fP9ZZqU57RK9WtJX6hd4082MwFEhqJtTF3stSpxgyJi427EVoNbdd3kLwd3CIscCNAktVs8BNQgDDFO2CBzvmXzBneXJEq0iSNn2M2gUMOcpD46uE3RnAxr-XFdNpY/s1600/elumige+by+Roberta+SchulbergGoro.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="297" nt="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNn_FSmRz9iCo_v_fP9ZZqU57RK9WtJX6hd4082MwFEhqJtTF3stSpxgyJi427EVoNbdd3kLwd3CIscCNAktVs8BNQgDDFO2CBzvmXzBneXJEq0iSNn2M2gUMOcpD46uE3RnAxr-XFdNpY/s400/elumige+by+Roberta+SchulbergGoro.png" width="400" /></a></div>From the hallway near the kitchen, the exit door opens to an outside balcony which leads to the elevator and stairs. Along this walkway there are sometimes other residents who "Hello," nod, and move on. Encounters are seldom and brief. Words, rarely spoken, are courteous but hollow, without warmth, at times garbled. Despite the close proximity of the apartments, residents here don't really know each other. Gestures toward friendship cause flinching reactions of withdrawal as if to imposition; further attempts result in peculiar actions being set into motion with the intention of turning sociable forwardness to preference for distance. This is done in oblique ways such as repeated placings of generous unannounced gifts of salt-free spaghetti in its own organic water on the doorstep or, with stiff smiles, trotting in hasty passbys while handing packages of chocolate-covered hot peppers through the not yet fully opened door. The few people still co-existing here do not accompany one another but are careful to display only intentions of goodwill. <br />
<br />
In the short time it takes the elevator to reach the ground, the mummers observed through the window have become phantoms. The cars in the parking lot suggest the presence of people but the yard is still and along the face of each building the tiered walkways are empty. A narrow pavement connects and surrounds the twenty or thirty multi-dwellings of the enclave, now mostly untenanted. The greenery along the face of each building is sparse and sickly. The grounds' caretakers, who slip in and out almost unseen and never heard, regularly replace the cropped scrubby bushes with the same kind of cropped scrubby bushes, scrupulously maintaining the landscape, but without relish. A brief walk along the pavement finds the solarium, a remaindered amenity on one of the harsh, graceless spaces between buildings. Peering through the gate, the activity seen is welcome relief, a lively beckoning indicating that in this place one can find company and conversation; acquaintance can be established here. Past the gate and inside the hundred-foot square fenced in area, four or five noticeably energetic, garrulous figures, spread out around the small dipping pool, call to each other sociably as they sit or stride among more sedate loungers reclining on deck chairs. The vociferous sunners have a vigorous air which, whether chatting from a deck chair or wading in the dipping pool, sets them apart and marks them as pivotal. Strutting like actors trained to make themselves conspicuous, they hold the spotlight through the sounds of their voices. Although their volubility is directed towards one another as to a group of friends, it is obvious that they intend to be overheard by others around the pool. Like that of most people, their patter is filled with cracker-barrel such as stories of their nephews successes or discussions about local restaurants or ratings of television programs, all with a genial chattiness that seems to invite participation and does sometimes include others at poolside although usually most of the other loungers quietly recline, absorbing the sunshine. After listening for a while in eagerness to join co-residents in conversation, there slowly begins to be perceived in the speech of these glib performers a studied wariness of the impromptu. It becomes disturbingly apparent that the attraction of homey gregariousness was merely a first impression. Their speech sounds noticeably contrived and gives an impression of hearing slick performance, not extemporaneous conversation. The firmness of individual identity usually sensed in a speaker's groping attempts to set hooks onto reality through conversation cannot be perceived through their chatter. Their talk holds no quirky details of actuality of lived life, only a travesty conforming to preconceptions of what people would say in such a situation, a realization disheartening to someone come onto the scene hoping to find the conversational interchange of new acquaintance. Gabbing like been-arounds and seen-it-alls, they stumble onto topics less familiar to themselves than to a listener and reveal through bluff and fudge that they are pretending to be who they aren't, from places they have never been and talk of things they don't know about. Through time I have witnessed that starting a new discussion or developing a new topic with one of these cynosures can cause abrupt intervention as if to an alarm. The enclosure suddenly might be found to require emptying for repair of the plumbing, or a distant shout call the flamboyant speaker to an emergency, or the microphone blares an announcement of an impending dangerous storm, causing the loungers to scatter. The improbable but actual intrusion ends any further discussion. Any attempt to begin a conversation with a less conspicuous lounger is a call for one of the manipulating talkers to convivially walk over, join in, and gain control of the conversation. The chitchat discretely started by unobtrusive sunners slips away unshared by them and the conversation is redirected. Why some of the sunners permit the intruder to take the lead in their conversation is unclear. Maybe because some of them are themselves functionaries of these grounds. The manner and method of the speakers, besides hiding the truth about their actual lives and the world they live in, make it evident that they don't regret not hearing anything anyone else might have to say. Whatever the facts about this puzzling enclave, it maintains advanced resident control, although obviously lacking in subtlety and finesse. Focusing on the players' demeanor, they can be observed to consider themselves as unquestionably above the naiveté of the others present, as being in possession of unchallengeable worldliness in comparison, and as justified in being confident that onlookers cannot see through their affectations. They have developed a panache which implies, "Observe how we, conventional, humble, no different from you and the same as everyone else, have masterfully rooted in the very world you people believe is in evidence around you." After having listened to them for some length of time, each of the role players seems to be personally without a past or present, as if brought into being for the purpose of creating such contrived scenes, arrogant without ego, secure in obedience to their unspoken mission. Although it's likely that they are endowed with greater trust and stature than the mummers, they appear to share the same purpose to present a façade, to falsify actualities. Mostly, the monopolizing players-of-parts scant the onlookers and one can observe the players' annoyance at the continued presence of the uninitiated for whom they are constrained to act, those required to accept the busy attention of conspicuous displays of concealment regarding the truth about this elusory situation and about the players-of-parts themselves. The hollow-spirited players do not hide scorn for the ingenuous at their rim. They despise the comparative weakness inherent in their autonomous individuality, yet they enjoy attempts to weaken them further. Their domination is strengthened by at least one other startling tactical employment. On occasion their chatting tosses out a quip which contains a concealed humiliating insult alluding to something known uncannily of an unidentified target who, recognizing the reference as connected with himself, registers a rising dread and visibly shrinks in withdrawal. Fear has been instilled by intimation of secret gatherings of personal information. The players disdain the outsiders' claims to private, individual histories, self-regarding "selves," unlike the team of players enacting the conspirational complicities of the stage of "no-life-of-one's-own" and "our lives are representative of everyone's life," who are so surely and securely, so knowingly, so one-of-the-bunch, so arrogantly yet collectively, conformingly, humble but not weak. <br />
<br />
Except for the few actors in such briskly spun scenes as at the solarium, the grounds of the enclave are starkly bare of people. Sometimes a figure flits to the foreground and disappears as one continues to walk along the pavement. No one greets. The hot sun bakes but the heavy air is soggy with dampness. A few cars pass on the narrow winding road adjacent to the walk, but the heavily tinted windshields conceal whoever is inside. No passing automobile ever opens a window to reveal a neighbor or to offer a lift. On one of the longer sides of the rectangular perimeter of wall and bush which surrounds the old housing development, at each of its two ends, exiting paths abruptly enter onto a broad, impersonal, dangerous speedway of onrushing traffic. It is along this speedway that one reaches the nearby merchant center where necessities can be purchased. On the opposite side of the rectangular perimeter there is no egress beyond a thick tangle of tall impenetrable shrubbery. The cement walk circles around and through the grounds to lead back to the start. No large expanse of space is visible and the enclosure encases only the stillness of cemented buildings, the empty, portentless, uninviting walk, and the bushes which on one side display through their gaps the road of heavy traffic. <br />
<br />
Little can be determined about nearby communities which, as one enters them from the speedway, appear as untenanted as Enclave Folkadir. Several times a day a bus on the speedway carries it's few passengers to the civic center ten miles away, a town surrounded by major roads and in size no more than half a mile square. It is beautifully maintained, has a very modern aspect, and is pleasant to walk through, but except for guards and a few other key personnel in the official buildings, it seems as abandoned as the solely residential areas. A local newspaper purporting to be news of all communities within the paper's distribution area, not far from its (undisclosed) office address, U.S.A., is delivered before dawn to Ma'am Driftwater, the apartment's owner, and placed on a table just within the living room entrance for the use of anyone who enters into the apartment. None of the reported events and no events anything like them have been witnessed in this location. None of the people mentioned by the paper are known in Folkadir. Murders make front page headlines often. Multiple reports of sexual attacks on girls in public are frequent, the accused rapists counter-accusing the girls of wearing their skirts too short, inviting rape. Bishops of the Catholic church have been accused of homosexual enticement of high-school boys who are considering life in the monestary. Trials of the infamous offenders are held by consensus of opinion in newspaper surveys. Pages labeled "Society" are filled with reports of awards for knowing the well-connected, and reports of divorces by famous husbands of dependent wives with children who become homeless or with reports of women who receive millions in alimony after divorce, leaving their string of formerly rich husbands penniless are frequent. Seldom are headlines about politics. Discussions of national policies are avoided. Reports of elected or appointed state-wide or local officials being forced to step down from office after being accused of behavioral scandal are regularly presented as politics-as-usual. Local political involvement for which approval is shown is extending invitations to luncheons. Traffic accidents occur. There are banking questions regarding an unprecedented number of home mortgage foreclosures due to growing numbers of business bankruptcies causing loss of jobs, columnists suggesting as a remedy the institutionalizing of government financial backing and funding for new mortgages to spur the housing economy along with reduction in taxes. There are regular sections of sports, of entertainment. At present, computer games are "thrusting their way into the central economy." The communications of the newspaper, attempting to create a frightening ambiance of threat and foolishness in the description of local surroundings has little effect on those within the household because that described world is experienced as undiscoverable anyway. The forthrightness of the newspaper's reporting of the supposed facts, as of other of the enclave's displays, is soon doubted. <br />
<br />
In the shallow-depthed porch-like back room Ma'am Driftwater sits alone. No one has visited for a long time. No friends run in to offer a drive to the market. No neighbor knocks to share local news. The apartment receives only those people who are paid by Ma'am Driftwater for their services. I'm paid room, board, and a small amount of cash to do kitchen work. In my distress during the era of displacement and economic overturn Ma'am Driftwater, a distant relative, offered me this position and I am the only other person, besides herself, to live in the apartment. Although we had known each other earlier through family get-togethers, within this household Ma'am Driftwater refuses all conversation and shows no concern except as required for practical household reasons. Other workers who enter the apartment perform their work quickly and leave just as quickly. Almost no words are spoken. Except at her meal and bed times, she sits all day in the porch-like, open-windowed, non-air conditioned, tiny glass-encased room, its interior entirely visible through the broad sliding doors separating it from the livingroom. A television, which she watches during evening hours, and a telephone are in that room. The glass expanse of its outside wall faces a large artificial pond adding its sogginess to the already heavy humidity of the surroundings. Despite the need for air conditioning in this sweltering climate, she makes it clear that the expense of air conditioning is not a benefit to her. I am the only other person to live in the apartment, and the air-conditioning is included in the agreement for room and board as pay. Across the pond, the windows of the identical buildings on the opposite side are sometimes lit at night, but no people can be seen through them. The view of the pond, narrow stretches of grass between pond and buildings, and the buildings themselves holds no one. Fishing is not allowed; pamphlets of rules are delivered monthly. At seasonal intervals maintenance men driving power lawn mowers are briefly seen through the back window, but they don't live within the enclave, their voices aren't heard, and they quickly disappear from the grounds. Turning from Ma'am Driftwater's glass-doored room to face the opposite livingroom wall and its open passthrough to the kitchen, one can see along the full length of the kitchen to its window in the front wall. A walk through the hall into the kitchen and one can look through that front window to see the mummers on the pavement below.<div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-53218837362094897942010-03-27T19:47:00.000-04:002010-04-02T15:49:36.615-04:00Part II - The Old Enclave FolkadirBy Roberta SchulbergGoro<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">II. Parlance</span> <br />
<br />
<br />
All day Ma'am Driftwater sits silently alone in her glass-encased room which, like the other rooms, is heavily decorated with memorabilia china knicknacks, ornate decorations and elaborately framed vapid paintings. Rare verbal exchanges between us do not amount to conversation. An infrequent attempt at a word in passing results in a silencing look of rebuke from Ma'am Driftwater and even involuntary facial expressions in reaction to the minor occurances in the household are inhibited by her flashing eye of disapproval. Existence has been made crimped and painful, normal spontaneity thwarted, discourse averted and a solitariness worse than ordinary aloneness enforced. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifrM5C1gfdDcVwycssT-_MunIRRLTXfMpKIWYwRO6ax5AB2r16Xm3G6MZloJVptxIWsMjmJf9fc94_zEzO2i-ypNFgVjwu_DMysr7FfOzWhVDGJAkN4bpbayUwNJ1PNa1XeqEWpfQoRePo/s1600/image004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" nt="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifrM5C1gfdDcVwycssT-_MunIRRLTXfMpKIWYwRO6ax5AB2r16Xm3G6MZloJVptxIWsMjmJf9fc94_zEzO2i-ypNFgVjwu_DMysr7FfOzWhVDGJAkN4bpbayUwNJ1PNa1XeqEWpfQoRePo/s320/image004.jpg" /></a></div>The walls of the apartment encase an isolation, a sense of emptiness, an absence of the common exchanges and enterprise of household community but they do not surround a silence. A continual murmur of babble floats through the rooms. Words in sotto voce and in crescendo form and ride on volumes of air. Squadrons of voices, each squadron specifically recognizable by topic or style of sound, interchange in re-occurring turns of swelling and dwindling gusts. The sounds, no more than an inexplicable odd word or phrase coming from an indefinite location once or twice a day at my arrival, have lengthened and compounded. The voices are<a href="http://www.blogger.com/"></a><span id="goog_1337353773"></span><span id="goog_1337353774"></span> flagrant in emotion, vitriolic, damning. Teams of speakers pronounce in riddles, jeer inuendos, or taunt with obscure messages of ambiguous non-communication. Some are chorales of dully repetative metronomic moaning indicating mind reading powers by verbal mimicry of thoughts. These carry along with them subordinate voices, a self assured vassalage filling out the sounds of the lugubrious chorus with shrill insults and jeers. Picking up claims to familiarity only by listening to the sneers of the mimickers, they add above the mimickers' turgid undulating sounds a staccato of snickering taunts regarding particular characteristics of the distressed, lumbering mover through the room. The engulfing sound never includes dialogue or conversation, not even among themselves. The voices don't reason. They do not acknowledge any questions, ignore statements and provide no clue to the original cause of their obsessive stalking. They offer no information beyond their present observations and they clarify nothing. I have not been able to discover the mechanical source of the sound as it follows from room to room, even outdoors, but it's clear it has no trouble in focusing on me, who is to them somehow a tangible presence. I am clutched in an impalpable labyrinth of hatred. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPw42OTkkIMGmCYp37u9X7zQEvr5z8cbxCCqmD6uua70pSvY9ZVtbCDD5gEJNBSx1ByIfJwaIofZThiCGgw4ViSIp8Cy7rck_UyO7SEkn5hgOKmliE8uxcmvWfZOc1qgdnjUYHrZQVK_2v/s1600/Elumige+by+Roberta+SchulbergGoro+005.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" nt="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPw42OTkkIMGmCYp37u9X7zQEvr5z8cbxCCqmD6uua70pSvY9ZVtbCDD5gEJNBSx1ByIfJwaIofZThiCGgw4ViSIp8Cy7rck_UyO7SEkn5hgOKmliE8uxcmvWfZOc1qgdnjUYHrZQVK_2v/s320/Elumige+by+Roberta+SchulbergGoro+005.png" width="232" /></a></div>I almost never mention my jottings to Ma'am Driftwater who allows me use of one of the household computers, and she seems quite genuinely tolerant of the way I spend my free moments, but putting my thought on record arouses the hostility of the voices who, on general principle, approve only embellished docility, compliments, and fear of authority from someone caught in their net. They claim the right to censure actions and mete out penalties, the acceptability of any activity judged and delimited by one simple measurement, the amount of its immediate provision of service. They condemn my having concerns outside of cooking, washing, and general servitude. Typing requires a mental fight, a struggle against the threat and hostile racket filling the room. The intruders connect to the computer and tamper with my personal files. They slip deriding comments into paragraphs as I type and cast infantile offensively "smutty" words or graphics onto the screen in an attempt to turn me away from use of the computer. Groups claiming religious authority become enraged when images of people appear on the screen, accusing of sacrilege at witnessing depictions of humanity in images whether religious or not. Attempts to reach connection beyond this entangling web brings only despair and the internet appears to be narrowing, localizing to a nowhere. When using a computer in search of contact with co-respondents having answers about this disordered vortex, the invisible assaulters substitute obviously false and sometimes silly documents and histories for requested references. They grunt hatred, snarl invective at every word, shout expletives to interfere with thought. They threaten me with forfeiture of life as penalty for continuing computer search and notation and when angry they give evidence of their ability to carry out their threats. They have revealed that they can cloud the mind, obscure thought, even freeze it in intervals of absolute stillness. They assert close personal acquaintance and a right to give me orders, an acquaintanceship which is one-sided, presumptuous, and derived from powers belonging to a separate region of existence distant from and unknown to me. Their possessiveness, their claim to the daunting right of intrusive castigation is a conundrum. Uniting into a jell of hostility, they fling any kind of blame, as if in merging together they can be confident of being too strong to suffer counter blame or accusation. They never discuss themselves. It's possible the individuals forming the swirl of repetitive, mechanically metronomic yackety chantings of hate and vilification do not even know each other, have never met, and are brought to a focus out of a miasma for derisive purposes, their own worldly spaces secret from each other. Both Ma'am Driftwater and I are silent about the phenomenon and I am uninformed about her awareness or perception of it. When did such events have a beginning? When were such technologies made possible? Are events like this everywhere and I a latecomer to awareness? Are there other people pinned in other eddies? Does government authority know of the phenomenon's existence? This reaction of mine, of silence, might be general in a totally encompassing climate of intrusion. As they advance and dissipate one can hear their voices thrill in expectation that their sport and frenzy will wear away spirit and mind. With bludgeon-like assaults, they deride present ills swollen girth, poor complexion, loss of one's charm to the opposite sex (a strangely chosen mockery in a clamping horror, but one often repeated), insinuate that I am a castoff from my people and never again to be known, and taunt with the peril of impending death which they hope to exact from the distance of their own claimed never-to-die world. Although they do not condescend to converse, they blame for my disregard of them throughout the day when there actually is no other recourse but to ignore their continuous drivel, giving attention to other things and other thoughts. They are pack-like in abusiveness, gang-like in their amusement at being able to attack without penalty. Sometimes a solitary voice among them seems to come alive with a protest or opinion of its own, as if to create a dialogue, a conversation, an argument, but then, disappointingly, it merges with the vague and hostile jammer and drone, conforming to the dampening purposes of demoralization. Through days, months of prolonged oppressive chanting one senses their impatience for completion of their goal, the diminishment or end of a human spirit as they hurry themselves to carefree futures, released from further need of effort in their corrosive mission. And meanwhile, at rare minutes throughout each day, piercing through the voluminous, turgid, undiscussed din of background hum and hammer are the distinctly sharp, perfunctory words of those within the apartment: the announcement of lunch, the receipt of a mail delivery or, as a passing pleasantry from Ma'am Driftwater, a report of current weather conditions easily visible through the window. To any other statement or query Ma'am Driftwater's response is, "What?" When repeated, she responds with, "What?" Again and her response becomes, "Why am I putting up with this?" The conversation has ended and after the first few tries such a course of effort is not likely to reoccur. <br />
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In the small windowed room where Ma'am Driftwater sits, there is a television situated against the wall opposite her. Ma'am Driftwater watches it every evening as it blares its messages, replay after replay, above the modulated hum of the raging voices. If it were only for its volume of sound, the television, unlike the newspaper, could claim major influence on those who live in the apartment, but besides its loudness, Ma'am Driftwater is rapt in its messages and even the maelstrom of voices seems to slow and quiet its remarks in order to hear it. Unlike the newspaper, the television news cabled in to the enclave concentrates heavily on foreign affairs. Newscasters in remarkably wistful, dramatically sentimental tones announce new gigantic wars whose causes match the incitements of major wars of the past two centuries. The wars, redrawn and regurgitated from past examples, now all take place in the other hemisphere in a succession of unconnected foreign nations with newly renamed geographies. Commentators preserve for the listener the attitude of "it can't happen here," but suggest that we should be intervening or assisting there, smug propaganda urging the right of democratic rule to act against the internal decisions of foreign governments when not approved by our values. According to television reporters, the primary focus of America is and should be Israeli Zionism, the secondary interest the turning of every other nation into a copy of the U.S.A, replacing other governments with one like ours by sending our soldiers to other-hemispheric foreign lands to protect other peoples from their own governments requiring of us huge outlays of money and a terrible expense of life with no gain to ourselves but the correction of error in foreigners. No major plans for future development of the nation or locally are discussed except for over-taxation complaints, medical insurance dishonesty issues and the stock political phrase, "our children's children" used in connection with the advance of civilization toward a peace gained from winning other people's wars for them. The commentators, in the year 2008, lament the low pay of teachers in the public schools which are now nowhere to be found, and argue the technological feasibility of finding new oil digs to solve the gasoline problem. In an exaggerated and unconvincing effort to create an impression of spontaneity, commentators interrupt each other and stridently shout opinions as if in heated debate, hoping that loud and insistent yelling will impress listeners with the aliveness of their contemporary authority on topics long outdated. Presentations are based on verbiage carried over from a barely understood earlier time and a difficult, strife torn, broadly reflective, and ponderously contemplative U.S. past history is extenuated into a dangerous, inanely thinned pablum. <br />
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Included in the enclaves cabled-in programs are "educational" television games offering excited contestants a chance to win unbelievably enormous sums of money, worrying listeners about whether Fort Knox has been raided, the banks' greenbacks falling like confetti. Programs of trivial how-to's, imply the audience's inability to do the least elementary thing without step-by-step, complicatedly expanded and pensively delivered sets of directions. Simple, every-day, universally routinely-managed home and household chores are pontificated to the housewife (who, like elementary schools, are also nowhere to be found) and to the correspondingly simple man of the house who learns to read the label for the words "strong repair bonding" (quantities available for purchase by phoning the number on the screen) when buying glue to repair household furniture and knick-knacks. Later in the evening this is followed by programs of old trite songs of sexual capture delivered in the singers' personal style of distortion and loss of meaning through use of insipid enhancements or convoluted ornamentation which emphasize the singer's "originality". Besides games and tunes, there are, on the light side of T.V., a few situation comedies. In these playlets the measurement of worthiness in men is wealth for purposes of power, and in women, virginity. Even wifehood is a slide into loss of virtue. Nevertheless, girls of any age take no interest in anything besides "dating." Boys are always in trouble from catering to girls. Mothers are always in the kitchen. Fathers always have important jobs, although the camera doesn't focus on the job, but on the home where fathers do most of the speaking, their patient voices patching up the mistakes of their silly wives or daughters. Boys are mostly out of the house getting into trouble caused by someone else's silly daughters. The 1950's television character "Our Miss Mainstream" of young, robust unmarried feminine fortitude," is no longer enduring singleness in a woman's hotel, searching for suitable employment in a tough city. Her counterpart is now portrayed as a man-hungry trapper fallen to a luxury high-rise in Miami who discusses with her female roommate her choice between accepting, as a Saturday night adventure, a date with her former husband (in town for a business convention without his new wife) or encouraging the interest of one of her more recent, more-or-less enthusiastic boyfriends. The canned laughter makes it clear that viewers of this comedy are encouraged to congenially and lightly accept these sorts of non-virginal actions by the leading character since she has overcome the weighty negatives by the redemption attached to her (1) being acceptably silly, (2) having substantial independent financial security, (3) not competing for jobs.<br />
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After these early evening entertainments, the night is filled with the booming sounds of television religiosity. Shouted orations insult either the audience or the religion the "ministers" claim to profess with such messages as, "God's blessings of prosperity and good fortune will be rained down, now, listen here, on everyone, yes everyone who in faith accepts Jesus' death on the cross to save Christians from any, and I said any, punishment for their sins." Or regarding Judaism, "The profoundly serious mildness of the Jews, God's one-and-only "Chosen People," has exposed them everywhere to oppression by the less devout and more frivolous, not only in Europe, but in America where, in accordance with the uniqueness of Jewish probity, Jews lift themselves above the surrounding prejudice and rise, each and all together to blazing success. As a relief for Jews' sufferings caused by prejudice, television bible experts and television pastors urgently recommend collection of special monetary funds along with the organizing of emergency military support by the non-chosen Christians for the purpose of Jews' acquisition and transfer to territory in the orient, bringing on the glory of Jesus' second coming to all people, including Jews who, after they reach their promised land in the orient, will convert to worship of Jesus. Since it's unlikely that normally reflective minds can accept such attitudes as officially sanctifiable or realistic, one suspects that the forceful, loud, and emphatic declamations, intended to convince naive listeners of the earnest sincerity of the duplicitous "reverends," are calculated to cause antipathy, turning listeners toward disrespect, even contempt, of congregations belonging to other, quite different, world religions sharing the same name.<br />
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The nerve-wracking distortions of U.S. culture and attitudes refracted through what seems to be an alien lens of scorn expresses loathing for a hypothetical audience presumably lulled into assurances that such the hollow, the mindless, and the arrogantly interfering is their own remembered world of the U.S. still remaining intact or, on the contrary, to convince some who may be unfamiliar with it and just passing through to become it's active adversaries. It's clear to the listener that the commentators and the ministering orators of churches the "ministers" secretly scorn, accept themselves as living in a world of understanding quite beyond the flattened one shouted about so loudly and insistently to the audience. In an arrogance of the politics of pretence, they flaunt a self-satisfied pride in their creation of a world in which no one lives, in which no one has ever lived, in which no one can live, is blatantly unreal, but which they have assured themselves they have made convincing to an audience with cognizance far beneath their own. In this domain, "Punch-and-Judy" media professionals generally suffer from the delusion that everyone else is stupider than they are. <br />
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Walking through the apartment from the kitchen to the living room carries along with it the complaining gaggle of scolding kitchen voices transmuting word-per-word and voice-for-voice into the racket from Ma'am Driftwater's television on the other end of the apartment. Close approach to the sliding glass door finds the two sets of speech have reconformed into a unity, a television voice adding indirect reference to some minor happening in the kitchen or hallway minutes ago or to some object carried in hand through the hall, the voices managing to find something idiosyncratic in the uneventful moment for purposes of "coincidental" mention on the screen. An errand's traverse of the apartment completed, a withdrawal from the glass doors and view of the television screen, a turning back toward the kitchen, brings the reverse untangling and retangling of merging voices until the whirl again concentrates on the kitchen-style barrage, with a canned guffaw, a tuneful note, a current catchword reaching from the television in the other room through the tightly interlaced rat-a-tat-tat of complaints in the kitchen. <br />
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The sense of emptiness caused by the unanswerability of the verbal assaults circling the air, the hostile blather from the television, the limitation to infrequent routine remarks increase the weary listlessness caused by desolate isolation from conversation. I can find no way to reach beyond the enclave's communications abyss to genuine responsiveness, to the generous effusive spontaneity of authentic discourse beyond media fabulations and false polemics, beyond television examples of social life occuring nowhere, presented condescendingly to all and by none accepted, delivered with winking glances toward other baskers in condescension who, though aware of its scorn and deceit, help promulgate it because it contributes to their fantasy of being among the rare cognoscenti, among those not taken in by it. Honest confrontation and encounter has surrendered. Triviality grasps the environment, evasion grips all utterance.<br />
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And meanwhile, Ma'am Driftwater sits silently in her glass-enclosed room. Once in a very great while she turns she says, "It's a different world." Never once has she smiled. I don't smile either.<div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-80268242410502270262010-03-27T16:45:00.001-04:002010-05-29T13:34:28.719-04:00The Old Enclave Folkadir - Part III by Roberta SchulbergGoroby Roberta SchulbergGoro<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The old Enclave Folkadir</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Part III - Sentience</span><br />
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I was swept to this house remote from my original home of crowded streets, smiles from passersby, and shared community by the necessity of finding sustenance during the turmoil years of neighborhood displacement and job scarcity. Three years earlier, I would never have believed I'd consent to a position or residence so far from the bustling world I knew and now I cannot find my way back again. The world is breaking apart, receding like an expanding universe thinning by the mechanics of inertia, vacated spaces becoming abyssal gaps of separation, an encroaching vacuum insinuating, taking possession. People once known fade away, unexplained, into the emptiness. Bit by bit past associates are lost, contacts missing, telephones are reported "no longer in service." The curtainless windows of neighbors' apartments reveal empty rooms and the buildings of the enclave, once containing residences inhabited by the taciturn, are now filled with abandoned apartments become completely silent. The speakers at the solarium, instead of becoming more familiar through time have, one-by-one, retreated into the abyss, the solarium bit-by-bit deserted, the few remaining plastic-strung chairs grimy and overturned with lack of attention. The quality of the still-maintained sparse greenery has fallen from dullness to despondency. No one crosses the little bridge to the gazebo. The meeting hall, before ignored, is now locked. The nearby dangerously trafficked roads continue on to razed, deserted ones leading nowhere. <br />
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My walks through the grounds of the enclave have become less frequent, finding there only rare occasional, unfamiliar figures who answer my greetings with mechanical remarks and quick withdrawal. Within the apartment, the unceasing dull yacketies of floating complainants drone on as they have for months, the resulting reaction permitting that offensive swarm a sense of victory over my attitude of disregard by their having caused its replacement with blunted unresponsiveness. Escalation of threat has been continuous since my first hearing the voices and there has been added to the manifold grimness yet other dismal dimensions. Articulate but silent unseen beings cryptically call attention to their effectual presence. Objects, light in weight, have moved without apparent cause. Cups have slid across countertops. A dish sponge, placed on the flat ledge of the sink, with insistent repetition rolled, as if by minor shoves, into the basin after having, several times, been put back in its place on the ledge. The original cause of the disturbances hounding this castaway enclave being unknown, there is no way to know whether the unreported, unregulated, technologically advanced actions of the intruders derive from a single or a multiple threat, or whether the unexplainable movements originate from the same point as the voices. Besides sounds and displacements there are indications of unheard and unseen footed entry into the apartment. Food prepared for myself and placed in the freezer was mysteriously removed, reappearing weeks later in the same place, the container and its contents still perfectly fresh. Some small keepsakes, of no monetary value, placed on a cabinet near my bed disappeared between night and morning. Its apparent the intruders want to create the most effect with the smallest of detectable acts, eager to cause anger and disruption by having me confront Ma'am Driftwater regarding these incidents of disappearance. But there are other events less easily explainable than merely attributing them to pranks by Ma'am Driftwater. Unmomentous events requiring the carrying of heavier objects than Ma'am Driftwater could manage have been staged by unidentified tresspassers, calling attention to the probability of spatially close but unmet presences. A very large sack of old potatoes was put into the nearly empty refrigerator potato bin of the locked apartment during an outing to the foodstore by Ma'am Driftwater and me. The large cache of old potatoes, unexpected but left in place in the bin, caused a smelly rot on all the new ones before the damage was realized. This might have been intended to cause a casting of blame on me, as cook and kitchen help. The unobserved comings and goings in such minor mischief warns of the major harm the intruders might inflict if they decide against restraint. A more ominous event was the displacement of a beverage bottle standing on one kitchen countertop suddenly shifting in space and appearing, not there, but on a second countertop along the opposite wall, a transference which occurred while I was, according to my own awareness, awake, active and present in the room. This apparently innocuous manoevre of hide-and-seek, attempting a playfulness and in itself comparatively unthreatening, suggests menacing capabilities, among them the possibility of their closing-in physically for attack after cutting off the consciousness of inhabitants. Perhaps these unseen, close-by and materially active trespassers, invisible, but leaving traceries along the rim of an abyss, are themselves victims, local people controlled from a distance, suffering cutoff of their own consciousness' and at risk of suffering penalties for having performed questionable acts of which they have no memory. These occurrences can never be discussed with Ma'am Driftwater who imperiously avoids all conversation. <br />
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The workday in the apartment is long and the week sabbathless, but the duties of the house are light and do not, alone, explain the daily morning fatigue, the waking to an ethereal space which seems itself a thickly stuffed quilt of nagging, achy sleep wound round and round muffling the morning arising. Throughout the night pain causes awakening to hear murmured threats of death or worse before being allowed release again into disturbed slumber. The voices forewarn of pain and crippling which they seem, at least in part, able to bring about. Body dysfunctions which cannot be attributed to "psychological" conditions follow after threats. Aches are attached to censure for minor household mishaps and to complaints of laziness, lack of effort, conceit, and headstrong defiance. Diseases are aggravated by their disapprovals. Hunger or morbid lack of hunger, nausea, distortions of the senses, are applied by their word as quickly and easily as a brushstroke to a wall. Dawn can bring miserable awareness of a dreadful physical change having taken place during the night such as the thick hairy covering of my arms and hands, lasting for days, which I awoke to find one morning and the coloration of my body quartered into brown and white, for weeks particolored like a jester's costume. Obesity was delivered right in the middle of the day as I suddenly slumped and stupified. I became shorter and swollen almost to the extreme of inability to move, ache replacing elasticity. The cure of lesions and almost normal slenderization achieved through the health efforts of months, upon the anger of the voices, instantly changed back to a replay of aggravated obesity and lesions. Extreme morning exhaustion has caused me to wonder whether my body, unconscious in sleep through most of the night, had been exchanged for another more mistreated one, with one not having slept for days. Yet, in spite of pain, torpor, and worry, one must rise to the day's activities. The day's duties must be performed and the quotidian respected. Slow, limited movements cope with the requirement, lifting the lethargic pained body, repositioning the straining frame a leg lift at a time, clumsily arching the arms and back moment by moment throughout each day of the unbroken week's seven long days of fragmented hours until bedtime with no assistance or relief from chores when ill. Slowness of movement brings rebuke from the voices and askance looks from Ma'am Driftwater, causing frequent insinuations of my not earning my keep, threatening with possible ouster now that there is nowhere else to go and no one to go to. The persecuters neither acknowledge nor condone any argument besides their own and there is no way to encounter or confront powers and authorities of justice beyond these performers of hidden, secret, savage actions upon the helpless. <br />
<br />
The voices "saw something" beyond normal barriers, their remarks giving proof of their capacity to witness anything in the enclave. With an attitude of salacious raw arrogance they use this faculty to indulge degenerate desires to impose extreme debasement. As if to prove the futility of their victim's continuing with breath, they comment as they watch defecation, they hound while witnessing a wash in the shower, they accuse of shamelessness because washing and elimination continue as they look on instead of the suicidal disaster of not at all. They attempt to ensure, as long as there is life and memory, a continuum of suffering from having been subject to their scrutiny. Multiple voices insult with charges of perverse lack of femininity because there has been no witness to a seeking out of a male for sexual connection. They blame abstinence from sexual activity as a guilty denial to others the satisfaction of their natural requirements, blaming autistic self-centeredness for the refusal to offer oneself as dutiful sexual sacrifice. Their remarks reduce the person to the level of body organs and suggest that someone so alone and unlikely to be sought after as I am ought to put myself to use by providing bizarre sexual entertainments. They counter what they consider acts to avoid embarrassment by inflicting shaming comments in hopes of provoking violent reactions of mortification and frenzy, exciting for them to watch. It's hard to fathom what sort of people accept for themselves a code of action permitting themselves participation in such degradation of others. It appears to me that these enemies are not so much personal enemies as enemies of humanity in general, lawless toyers arranging human event for their own entertainment, spreading it to view as an amusement, something to laugh at or as a rallying call to those who, from behind safe lines, would join to rail against an observed helplessly floundering specimen of humanity. The attackers saw something and used what they saw in an attempt to create scenes of chaotic frenzy in a pinioned target, but while clawing through a tunnel to escape bondage one doesn't worry about the mud smears or one's appearance. If there's a frenzy, it's a frantic fearing that one's world is captive, all the people in it being brought helplessly, aware or not aware, to a controlled end. It’s a frenzy to find the ways and means of survival while struggling to reach the other end of the tunnel to life in the world of one's people if there is still such a world. The unidentifiable nameless enemy saw something.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFPAfs9iT4Y0M0cXp9xJIjs9iYhQN8haG9-TX5fGxv3icPuiP3-qDdI0VtfoJ0O8wq7cOGkhp-cHc7Zn7AXmXUW3YuLJU5LTNoDBbjHoPSh6-0SSfU_GKOy6x421jkzLqGRLfkmoAwyKQw/s1600/Elumige+by+Roberta+SchulbergGoro+006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="260" nt="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFPAfs9iT4Y0M0cXp9xJIjs9iYhQN8haG9-TX5fGxv3icPuiP3-qDdI0VtfoJ0O8wq7cOGkhp-cHc7Zn7AXmXUW3YuLJU5LTNoDBbjHoPSh6-0SSfU_GKOy6x421jkzLqGRLfkmoAwyKQw/s320/Elumige+by+Roberta+SchulbergGoro+006.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>All the while the dense streaming wall of dull chanting metronomics spews it's insults and casts its apportionment of maiming and death; "death," pronounced by the whipping circle of sound claiming to be from a world holding prospects of living forever. But through that thickly knotted and snarled belt there are intermittent piercings, widely spaced rents, gaps of passage through which words objecting to the assault sporadically pelt and spill. Evanescent strains of uttered protest against the attacks are heard and then not heard and then heard again through the more continual din obscuring opposition to oppression of spirit and mind. Sometimes I hear, in fleeting moments, possibilities of meeting, acquaintanceship, and sometimes I hear snatches of intentions of community among those finding a way to touch. It may be from these voices that, sometimes, despite the cordoning, I receive some practical attentions from a distance as mysterious as the source of the menace. When ill and in pain I sometimes sense curing rays. Threatened harm is sometimes mitigated or turned aside by words of some protective power opposing injury. A silent presence, making itself known to me through its actions on the computer, obstructs interference with my entries, the only activity in this situation to be of interest to me beyond the kitchen work. These voices of benevolence also saw something. They saw assault like a stormy turbulance attacking innocent mind and afterward the effort of resilient mind to re-shift to the self-possessing rhythms of its own spirit. They who were not enemies saw something and they saw to something. They made what effort they could, through threat and furor, to assist, even if they could manage only an infrequent word of hope. Yet, in the continuing repetition of injury, the emotional effect has been like being offered a last meal before ending in a void. Although real hope is welcome assistance to endurance, there has been no actual fulfillment of hope and the insistent beat, beat, beat continues. Can full human life ever be reached from the snare of cultural lies, unearthly pointless warpings and hatreds which grip these surroundings in a peristaltic funneling toward an abyss? Could there be a path to an active life in the world after passage through a vacuum? A heavy weight is on my spirit. With eyes clear and face impassive, there is within my chest a continual tearful crying. I have been ensnared and I now no longer know other places to which to run. I am held within a space of nowhere. <br />
<br />
The routine of the household has remained constant, probably a bracing requirement and something Ma'am Driftwater strictly insists upon. Hours are as they began. But now, in the evening, suddenly, before work can be finished, a consuming exhaustion descends and envelops my being, wrapping it in a heavy sleepiness, weighing down my eyelids as I struggle to keep awake. Straining in pain and unnatural fatigue to complete the evening's most necessary tasks, my mind bends toward the supporting stretch of my cot where I can give way in release to the soundful silence of the night: the exclamations of the television just barely heard through the space under the door; the low nightly murmuring attack of babble; the din of illness in the ear; old familiar voices calling my name as I drift into dream; nocturnal oblivian.<br />
<br />
Disturbance; awakening; shouts at the rim; at the selvage sounds of fear; implosion from a further world. <br />
<br />
End<div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-6503690161738476282009-08-10T15:07:00.000-04:002009-08-10T15:11:52.568-04:00Hatred as a Sporting Exercise<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG-2Utj9W-sg4lTopPIre2ehLOivooHAWFPTjiEZa9pPKzWDkZE0qaM7B_PAnjbfCBV3JD_h9vcvtwREgwPtTaFzIWKSoxc_1onvRU19tAl2zC0kiPA9TE-z93jitwVOlgCyREK9T_yDnR/s1600-h/FOR+BLOG+HODGEPODGE-++lustric+-Hatred+as+a+Sporting+Exercise.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 292px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG-2Utj9W-sg4lTopPIre2ehLOivooHAWFPTjiEZa9pPKzWDkZE0qaM7B_PAnjbfCBV3JD_h9vcvtwREgwPtTaFzIWKSoxc_1onvRU19tAl2zC0kiPA9TE-z93jitwVOlgCyREK9T_yDnR/s400/FOR+BLOG+HODGEPODGE-++lustric+-Hatred+as+a+Sporting+Exercise.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5368414236118414770" /></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4091486829820843175.post-32528982717920621532009-08-10T14:40:00.000-04:002009-08-10T15:21:24.778-04:00May 9, 2007<br />By Roberta<br /><br /><strong>Hatred as a Sporting Exercise</strong> <br /><br />Invective is to conversation<br />As fetter is to forth.<br />As Metronomic chants to felt rhythms,<br />As stud services to love.<br /><br />A withholding of love is an impossibility.<br />A hiding of love a misfortune, <br />A strained tort within life's complexity.<br />A withholding of hate is advisable -<br /><br />But a hiding of hate betrays itself <br />In flagrant veiled schemes,<br />Displaying in obviousness <br />The meagre paltriness of its soul.<br /><br /><strong></strong><div class="blogger-post-footer">BLOG - New Potpourri</div>Robertahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01715154255281768618noreply@blogger.com0