Winter ending

The winter is gone, and from somewhere, comes the smell of a fire in the spring night air. Come the mild yellow lamps of the city walk, where one is not so lonely among the empty blocks. In the darkness of the park, floating weightless like sparks, red cigarette ends held by invisible men sweep out hypnotic arcs, dimming and burning again.

A Paean to the CIA

May these black lines
Circumscribe the empire.
For the empire is safety.
And safety is freedom.
And freedom is light,
A steady candle in peace
Amidst shadows of cunning
Pressing in on all sides.
They would snuff it
If we couldn’t see in the dark,
We are intelligence watching
With coal-black eyes.

The Irrepressible Rise of the Unvanquished Phallus

[T]he sainted David Foster Wallace… called Updike “just a penis with a thesaurus” and predicted the end of the primacy of “Great Male Narcissists in American fiction. “Most of the literary readers I know personally are under 40,” Wallace wrote, “and a fair number are female, and none of them are big admirers of the postwar G.M.N.’s.”
…
In showering Mr Díaz with prize after prize, literary jurors seem to be saying the post-war GMN isn’t dead yet. Is it the wars, the terrorism, the recession, driving the longing for a regenerated machismo that Mr. Díaz’s multi-culti cred makes acceptable again? Is it a feminist backlash?

– source

The rebel penis stalks the land…

like the whispered name of a South-American guerilla, whom no amount of gunfire can seem to repress. The villagers have all heard of him, but none of them has ever seen him. You can put out rewards for his head, you can blanket the jungles in camo-clad killers, you can bug his lovers and bomb his hideouts — none of it is ever any use. Yesterday came reports that he’d been killed in a gunfight — a colonel saw the corpse, its distended length as limp as a washcloth, covered in blood, dirt, and leaves. ‘Not so tough now, are you?’ he thought. But then he looked down to light his cigar, and when he looked up again, the damned thing was sprinting away into the undergrowth. The colonel emptied his clip — too late! The irrepressible penis was once again on the loose.

Now the reports come in daily that he’s been spotted again. He is everywhere and nowhere at the very same time. In the lowlands he’s leading an ambuscade. In the highlands he’s executing a loyalist mayor. In Guayo, he pokes an old woman in the eye. He even leads a parade through the slums of the capital — there’s video footage of him, erect as a matador, his beret jaunted forwards and to the side, swaggering like Mussolini before the throngs of the rabble. Goddamnit! What kind of generals do we have? What kind of soldiers? What kind of bullets? Is he immortal or are they made of cotton? You knock him down and he springs up again, swinging as lethally as a knife strapped to a booby-trapped sapling. He’s as cunning as a rat, as cowardly as a possum, and he’s got a mental patient’s drive for freedom! freedom! freedom! Goddamnit, somebody catch this maniac! The resistance has got to end! We’re trying to run a country here!

A winter’s day between Zurich and Basel

For two weeks, the air water had been in a fog. It was dirty, dissolute — a depressed charcoal smudge. It wandered through Zurich in a haze of confusion, blindly falling down streets like a man on a bender. Then, last night, it finally fell asleep, and as it slept, its mind began to clear. I think it dreamt of self-coherence, because by morning, it had condensed upon itself. Maybe it recalled how once, as a stream, it was divided from sky as starkly as the waters of the first firmament.

Anyways, by the morning, it was still asleep. But it had stretched itself over the earth in a patina of silver — a crystal frost which coated the grass, and brush, and roofs. As it gently expired, the mist of its breath caught the bright, winter sun, whose gold it shone back outwards in a dream so frozen that the world that morning could have been the Platonic world — the model which only is seen by the mind. The fields my train passed were the ideals of fields. The trees were the ideals of trees. The hills rolled in silence as all true hills do. And it was as simple and true as mathematics.