Under the Sign Read Online Free PDF Page B

know, the one who seals himself in an enormous Coke bottle filled with Coke and then tries to drink his way out of it? Just as we were headed into the curving tunnel over Grand Central, she explained about the ring. The one I had, an emerald, simply slipped down the drain.
    31.
    The dark is not an allusion to anything untoward. That primordial analogy has the characteristics of an absolute. Light: good . Dark: evil. But when you think about it, the reverse is often the case. I suppose, before electricity, the dark might have been construed as ominous. Even now, with the storm approaching, we make sure to have candles and such on hand, just in case. Just in case the flat, barren vista opens before you as you turn to kiss him on the mouth and feel the slight tug stirring below on a cloudy night without a single star to help you find your way home to the

    mercantile ravishment of new linens. Ah, Joni Mitchell: “I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French cologne.”
    The emerald was cracked. It had had another life before it came to me, and who knows, maybe others before that, time without end. Surrounded by small diamonds, it sat up in a high, ornate gold setting, its cracked green eye staring out, the diamonds wincing. Others have probably noted the word gag sitting inside of engagement . The original artifact was made of cloth, and large enough to place across the mouth of the beloved. The smile gag, it was called, a soft crescent scarf tied at the back, its tissue tails falling provocatively under her long tresses. Sometime toward the end of the century before last androgynous energies were unleashed, especially in the West, and so the smile gag found itself used by thieves to cover their faces during criminal acts; sported by cowboys around their necks at hoedowns. In the 1950s, teen girls once again took them up as “neckerchiefs.” Or, comme il faut , “neckies.”
    She plucked the fine hairs under the chin. Her sufferance of fools did not exist, and under the heading “fool” she included all forms of destitution. She turned her back on the immigrant woman who wanted, in the midst of another opening for another show, to unburden herself of her trials on her journey from Kraków to America, losing everything in its wake. She ignored the fellow always seated under the canopy of the Korean deli’s assorted flora, who addressed her with a dull familiarity: How’re you doin’ today? She kept her eyes forward, uptown. She stored these human impositions for a later moment when they emerged from her beautiful mouth as cunning, comic bile.
    32.
    The spark we do not see when we put the key into the ignition. Or when we turn up the heat, and the floor trembles as the furnace
    is called upon to heat the room. Life heat. Death cold. What to do? Another hot war, heat the planet up with fire, burn everything, the temples of course, and the fences—so what if they once made good neighbors? The hell with that; we need fire to heat our freedoms to boiling point, and then make some nice green tea. I like mine with honey and soy milk. The ice caps melting is outside of our current policy. It confuses the issue.
    Coetzee:
    â€œPain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.”
“I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any price.”
    33.
    The sky is good company. It refuses to accumulate, which makes it always first; the sky and music. These should be the elected guides for the new world order. The sky cannot repeat: most precious, most desirable. This particular light, that cloud, these colors, have they ever been before? I conclude they have not, although there is virtually no way to know; no proof. Swipe, swipe.
    Emerson called his journals Savings Bank , Blotting Book , and Wide World.
    February 1820:
    These pages are intended at their commencement to contain a record of new thoughts (when they occur); for a receptacle of all the old ideas that partial but peculiar peepings