Monday, January 14, 2013

Philip Roth's The Human Stain, with Anthony Hopkins, brought to you by... dishwashing detergent.  (A great look at college politics, and, so far a very good movie.)  Cool.  After watching Frost Nixon.  A weirdly good late night on TV.  Have other networks come to support a bleeding PBS?

Well, at my age, living alone, I could eat my home made delicious Bolognese Ragu with rice penne straight out of the pan, a beautiful sensitive sauce, and who's to care?  Back, as close as one can get to the early human eating habit, meat, sauce, a little wild grain unaltered by domestication and agriculture.  Only thing is, I'm running out of Lascaux, a beautiful red from the Languedoc imported by Kermit Lynch, down to the last glass and a half--uh oh.  I end up eating out of an earthenware bowl, which anyway makes sense--pan too hot.




I get the feeling sometimes
that I, or my soul,
is a tiny half step behind me, just following,
as if to watch a child,
'what's he going to do?'
We both know what I have to go and do.
I go and deal with it.
And the part of myself, the higher part,
which could have done so many things,
being perfect, as all souls,
good, generous, sensitive and logical, even,
has to go and follow me, with what I've done,
with this life.  The stuff you got to do,
in this case, tending bar, whatever that is.
Not quite perfect, if that's what the self
that was led by the soul
ended up doing in this, the real world.
(It's actually fun, if you let yourself do it.
People come to you for suggestions
about wine.  That can't be
all bad.)
But that self that follows,
so closely, all the time,
telling you things about yourself,
quite aside from your own getting
accustomed to things,
asks.  Do you...
are you happy?
Why not play music of your own
more often?  Why not teach?  You could do that.
Except,  I know,
a pain in the ass.
And Shakespeare's language
goes farther away from us, each day,
as we go about our business.

I'm led to think sometimes,
there is repetition, duplication,
as far as great thought and impulses go.
There's a little bit of the great
in each of us, a shadow, a reverb echo
sort of thing.
And we are wonderful about repeating,
about bringing to life
that original thing we might have read about.
And that is the main thing.








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