My mother is obsessed with reading about Jesus these days.
I see books piled by her bed, most of them borrowed from my library: novels, handbooks, sectarian polemics, writers coming to blows. Sometimes when I’ m passing by her room she calls on me to step between them and resolve their disputes. (A little while ago I came to the aid of a historian called Kamal Salibi, whose forehead had been split open by a Catholic stone.)
HOLLYWOOD
Must the Morgue be my Only Shelter??
Welcome to your day of sanity! Come in and close the door it will likely lock behind you and you will be home alone waste disposal will take care of your needs : at long last undisturbed phenomena without the heavy metal background of the street will be yours for observation and response : do you have visions? do you think? Your mouth do you open it for more than medication?
I don't usually talk to strangers, but it is four o'clock and I can't get a cab. I need a cab because I have packages, but it's four o'clock and all the cabs are off duty. They are making a shift change. At the bus stop I say, It's hard to get a cab now. The woman standing next to me glances over without turning her head. She faces the street where cab after cab drives by with its light off. She says, as if to anyone, It's hard to live now. I don't respond. Hers is an Operation Iraqi Freedom answer.
A father tells his son the thing he regrets most about his life is the amount of time he has spent worrying about it.
Worry 1. A dog’ s action of biting and shaking an animal so as to injure or kill it, spec., a hound’ s worrying of its quarry; an instance of this. 2. A state or feeling of mental unease or anxiety regarding or arising from one’ s cares or responsibilities, uncertainty about the future, fear of failure, etc.; anxious concern, anxiety. Also, an instance or cause of this.
....................... hello hello hello ... Weiwei ... where have you been? ... I see you in dreams ... bleeding ... in the darkness of the sun ... 81 spots in the flame ... each a nightmare one cannot wake up from ... Weiwei ... the last son ... you told me as we said goodbye ... your last night on the Lower East Side ... 未未 ... the last child of your Mother and Father ... born in the labor camp ... exiled from Beijing to the far desert ... watching your Father clean public latrines for singing the truth
Fame is not fastidious about the lips
which spread it. So long as there are mouths
to reiterate the one name it does not
matter whose they are.
The fact that to the seeker after fame
they are indistinguishable from each other
and are all counted as equal shows that this
passion has its origin in the experience
of crowd manipulation. Names collect
their own crowds. They are greedy, live their own
separate lives, hardly at all connected
with the real natures of the men who bear them.
May 1978
