Thursday, January 02, 2003

Another Hallucination A horse came to me through the woods, sleepwalking through thick fog, its eyes literally closed. The hooves of the sleepwalking horse were long and yellow and curled up like the shoes of elves. There was lightning in the blue windows of a treehouse, where scientists were boiling the world down to a phosphorescent dust. Great shocks of thunder rolled through the treetops and shook the birds down from their hiding places. The birds were concussed by the thunder and fell like dull-thudding fruit from the trees, landing on their backs with their eyes staring up at the sky. Seven men sat huddled and miserable in a trench that was slowly filling with water. The rain bled and carried away the words that one of the men was trying to read as comfort to his trench mates. Every story was either forgotten or in the process of being forgotten. One of the men tried in vain to recall the words to a single Bob Dylan song, and, thwarted, eventually settled for a few tentative fragments of a nursery rhyme. Soon enough all the world would drown. The men took turns trying to remember and describe their mothers' smiles. A vaguely familiar voice, amplified somewhere above them, stumbled again and again through the alphabet.   Hippocrates, on Hemorrhoids An hemorrhoid in a woman may be thus cured. Having fomented with plenty of hot water, boil in the water certain of the fragrant medicines, add pounded tamarisk, roasted litharge and galls, and pour on them white wine, and oil, and the grease of a goose, pounding all together. Give to use after fomenting.   Hippocrates, on the Prospects of Surviving a Hanging Of persons who have been suspended by the neck, and are in a state of insensibility, but not quite dead, those do not recover who have foam at the mouth.   Hippocrates, on the Perils of Inebriation If a drunken person suddenly loses his speech, he will die convulsed, unless fever come on, or he recovers his speech at the time when the consequences of a debauch pass off.   Hippocrates: Eunuchs, Fear Not Baldness! Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.   Madame Curie Dreams of Radium Whenever Pierre and Marie, alone in their poor place, left their apparatus for a moment and quietly let their tongues run on, their talk about their beloved radium passed from the transcendent to the childish. I wonder what it will be like, what it will look like, Marie said one day with the feverish curiosity of a child who has been promised a toy. Pierre, what form do you imagine it will take? I don't know, the physicist answered gently. I should like it to have a very beautiful color....           --Eve Curie, from Madame Curie   Socrates Could Hold His Liquor And we are told that Socrates, though indifferent to wine, could, on occasion, drink more than anybody else, without ever becoming intoxicated.           --Bertrand Russell     6:03:30 PM

The Ghost and the Buffalo Nickel You have your dreams, I suppose, and I have mine. But let me assure you, it's a sometimes scary thing to be dreaming on your feet, moving around your dark house in the middle of the night, technically conscious but untethered, too exhausted to row your flooded boat. The other night I threw a buffalo nickel at a ghost. I somehow made my way down the stairs to the kitchen. In the refrigerator there was a huge jar full of shiny blue planets, floating in a luminous, olive-green liquid. The planets themselves were illuminated from within like lanterns. The rest of the refrigerator was as dark as outer space. The little planets were moving in slow motion like the laziest and most beautiful of fish. Or like underwater swans. Every time the refrigerator opened a little speaker somewhere in the dark interior croaked, "I'm sorry."  There was nothing to eat in the entire house --all the cupboards were full of nothing but dark angles and shadows, and I had no intention of eating the planets. From somewhere in the night outside my house I heard a ching-chinging that I mistook for an ice cream wagon. I walked to the front door in my underwear and stepped out onto the porch. There, moving along the sidewalk across the street from my house, was a radiant seven-foot ghost with bells tied to its sneakers, bouncing a basketball. I extracted a buffalo nickel from someplace and flung it at the ghost. The ghost turned the nickel into a butterfly. 11:48:45 AM

Happy New Year   Year’s end, All corners Of this floating world, swept.             --Basho   The desolation of winter; Passing through a small hamlet, A dog barks.            --Shiki   The Practice of Using Human Flesh For Food In ancient times, as I recollect, people often ate human beings, but I am rather hazy about it. I tried to look this up, but my history has no chronology, and scrawled all over each page are the words virtue and morality. Since I could not sleep anyway, I read intently half the night, until I began to see words between the lines, the whole book being filled with the two words: Eat People.           --Lu Hsun, A Madman's Diary   There are cases at the present time in which the practice of using human flesh for food is customary on a large and systematic scale. On the island of New Britain human flesh is sold in shops as butcher's meat is sold among us. In at least some of the Solomon Islands human victims (preferably women) are fattened for a feast, like pigs.           --William Graham Sumner, Folkways   It was a great moral improvement when men ceased to kill or eat their fellow men, and merely made them slaves.           --Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage   10:26:04 AM

© Copyright 2003 Brad Zellar. Last update: 4/6/03; 9:57:26 PM.