Category: Riffs

My fifth entry in the self-portrait marathon

But really, is this the face of an artist? Who am I kidding? Not my wise friends the flies, who rub their forefeet together in a travesty of devotion. En boca cerrada no entran moscas — flies don’t enter a closed mouth, says the Mexican proverb. But when is my mouth ever really closed, except for the fraction of a second that the camera shutter is open? Let the saints train their tongues to lie still as stones & their eyes to gaze modestly at their navels. It’s sheer hypocrisy to praise the open tomb while preparing oneself for the sealed reliquary. And in any case, the crawling faithful prefer the glistening surfaces of breasts or buttocks, with those dark & inviting hollows in between.

“First of all as to the patient’s face,” says Hippocrates: “does it resemble or not the face of persons in good health, and especially does it resemble itself?” This is what I’m wondering, my faithful physicians, health care in this country being as moribund as it is. You can rub your hands together all you want — you won’t get a dime of insurance out of me! Do I look like a rich man to you? Does my face have the unnatural glow of those who frequent health clubs with mirrored walls or fly airplanes into skyscrapers?

What you call dyslexia, I call poetry: an affliction in which nothing resembles itself, ever. A great poet like Eugénio de Andrade exceeds himself at every turn. Esta noite preciso de outro verí£o sobre a boca crescendo nem que seja de rastros, he wrote — “This night I need another summer on my mouth, gathering, even at a crawl.”

Would you recognize your own face if you saw it coming toward you down the street, without the usual soundtrack running through your head? Would you welcome it as an end to exile, or would you get out the flyswatter & the can of Raid? “Mama get your hatchet,” begged the bluesman Furry Lewis, “kill the fly on your baby’s head.” Buddhahood, they say, can be hazardous to your health. Best to go meditate on a corpse.

I have been thinking about the fools, those anti-heroes of proverb and byword. A whole fool is half a prophet, they say, and A fool is his own informer. Which half of the future does he see – the half without hope, or the half without informers?

The fool is prolific: he grows without rain, they say. He takes liberties. He puts on airs. The fool’s world is a paradise, but better hell with a wise man than the heaven of fools. Don’t they sound jealous, these anonymous pimps for wisdom?

The fool tries patience, proves the rule. You can tell an ass by his long ears, a fool by his long tongue. His laughter resembles the crackling of thorns under a pot, they say: a loud and useless fuel, soon spent. And they say there’s no fool like an old fool, so it seems the elderly must be held in high esteem in the fools’ country. A dead man is mourned for seven days, a fool for a lifetime. What a wise custom, to mourn people while they are alive, so they may appreciate the tributes! For seventy years we learn wisdom – and die fools.

The language of fools – Folly – must be among the hardest to master, because it so easily masquerades as ordinary speech. Answer not a fool according to his folly, says the Book of Proverbs, lest you become like him. But Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he become wise in his own conceit. No foolish consistency at work there!

Clearly, not all proverbs are creations of the wise, though it’s hard to tell which are which. For example: In the country of the fools, a proverb walks with a limp. So what? Balance is where you find it. And why shouldn’t a dog return to his vomit? It’s the only way to discover what really happened! Everyone agrees that God looks after fools, so why should we shun their company?

Proverbs are prickly things, full of acid and the taste of deja vu. Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it from him, says the Book of Proverbs. What dangerous folly! But aren’t proverbs in general a little like fools? For a fool cannot be questioned or explained, as the Yiddish proverb has it.

If we can’t trust proverbs, what do we really know about these strange people, the fools? Like most tribes, their own name for themselves is doubtless much less derogatory – in fact, it probably means something like “the people.” But given the difficulty of finding reliable informants, this is sheer conjecture. That fools are fond of sweets is an invention of the wise.

One hears about holy fools, though not of late. Fools used to have their own pope, too, chosen by popular acclaim – and vox populi, vox dei, as they say. I don’t think the Pope of Fools did much beyond carrying around a shepherd’s crook with no sheep in sight and issuing bull. But when the festival was over, he went wisely home to his wife.

Some say the fools have a tortoise for a king; we know all about his contest with the too-clever hare. The Yoruba call him Ijapa, and quote his proverbs for laughs – the only safe way to wax proverbial, I suspect. One morsel for the mouth, one morsel for the pocket – the word of Ijapa. What the world calls corruption the corrupt call being prudent. If you’re going to question authority, be sure to ask permission first – the word of Ijapa. Aren’t the best revolutionaries always like the good soldier Schweik?

I think I have identified one authentic saying of fools in the Bible: It rains on the just and the unjust alike. Who but a fool would believe such seditious nonsense? As Ijapa arrived at his in-laws’ house he exposed his penis, saying, “Nobody knows who might like to have a look.”
__________

Sources: Yiddish Proverbs, edited and translated by Hanan J. Ayalti (Schocken, 1949); Holy Bible; A Treasury of African Folklore, by Harold Courlander (Marlowe, 1996).

The scarab was in a world of shit. He took to it like a horse to water. “You can lead a fish to water, but you can’t make him blink,” he was fond of saying. He was happy as a pig in mud.

The scarab put his best face backward in order to keep a running tally of his progress, which was a matter of degrees – especially since he was in graduate school. Shit doesn’t just happen; you have to work at it. He covered all the bases, so typically he never got beyond the first date. All work and no play makes Johnny a very inept lover, the female beetles decided. Especially if he cares more about his stinkin’ piece-of-shit job than he does about you.

So he gradually backed himself into a corner, and that’s where the Egyptian priest found him. He said something cryptic and walled the scarab in with a few gold bricks. Ah, the irony! He had the balls of a brass monkey, and offered them to the scarab, but all the scarab wanted was to keep his shit together. He didn’t give a you-know-what about old world charm.

The gods must be crazy; that is their chief qualification. Whenever clients come seeking answers to life’s little dilemmas, the priest will place two steaming piles of dung in front of the scarab and study his reaction. “Holy shit!” the scarab invariably mutters to himself. “Holy shit!”

. . . to be lean, to maximize flexibility and minimize code bloat.

– www.codex.wordpress.org/Plugins

How fine to feel so fit from header to footer! That code bloat was killing me, I swear.

Now, I can maximize or minimize, mix and match, and if bugs can be fixed, I can flex unguessed-at muscles. The codex is the limit. This code seems most commodious.

I could rename every post slug “melvin” for the sheer hell of it. I could allow pings and trackbacks like a nervous hiker in grizzly country. I could learn to preprocess my hypertext, or content myself with editing the timestamp.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my sidebar blogrolled. Gray as a gravestone this theme in which I chip. I must prepare to meet the dead links with a 404 message that reads, Found – just not found here, and not by anyone you’ve ever heard of.

*

O.K., don’t mind me – just getting a little punchy here! Make yourselves at home. If you need anything, I’ll be down in the archives putting in shelves and cabinets, and unpacking things I didn’t know I had.