for Nick and Kaitie
1.
Yesterday, right when our call got dropped,
I was going to tell you something about marriage.
I was going to tell you something gnomic,
a maxim worth getting engraved.
I've since forgotten,
but I believe it was akin to saying that, like Truth,
marriage is impossible to define in verbal space.
So, I guess I'm glad I forgot. The words
would've seemed either too hastily conceived for their subject matter
or else weightless, enigmatic – without impact.
I think it was Auden who whined, “Marriage is rarely bliss,”
though he lightened the phrase by encapsulating it in the context of modern physics –
namely, *at least it has the ability to take place,
and that should be enough to bring bliss equal to Buddha’s Emptiness.
So, I'm happy our call got
dropped,
for the dial tone was
the pithiest aphorism on marriage any sentient life could've produced.
The key word is “produced.”
2.
This is what marriage is not:
Socrates gurgling hemlock
on his dusty prison cot,
giggling as he glimpsed a dikast’s deformed ****;
Nietzsche tenured for philology
at Basel; Nietzsche feverishly etching
Fick diese scheiße! on a Jena clinic's wall; biology
predetermining the team for which he was pitching;
a poem; a hotdog; *******;
a discharged Kalashnikov
engendering generational pain
somewhere in Saratov
circa 1942;
this is what marriage is not:
hatred, jealousy, ballyhoo,
obsessive yearnings for a yacht;
this is what marriage is not:
anything one pair of hands has wrought.
*August 22, 2013
^"I think it was Auden who whined, 'Marriage is rarely bliss,'..."^
from "After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics" by W.H. Auden
Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
Wherein a lover's kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one's neck.
^"...that should be enough to bring bliss equal to Buddha's Emptiness."^
Śūnyatā, in Buddhism, translated into English as emptiness, voidness, openness, spaciousness, thusness, is a Buddhist concept which has multiple meanings depending on its doctrinal context. In Mahayana Buddhism, it often refers to the absence of inherent essence in all phenomena. In Theravada Buddhism, suññatā often refers to the not-self nature of the five aggregates of experience and the six sense spheres. Suññatā is also often used to refer to a meditative state or experience.
^"I am not talking about inside-out space giraffes / debating Tensor-vector-scalar gravity..."^
Tensor–vector–scalar gravity (TeVeS), developed by Jacob Bekenstein, is a relativistic generalization of Mordehai Milgrom's MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) paradigm.
The main features of TeVeS can be summarized as follows:
- As it is derived from the action principle, TeVeS respects conservation laws;
- In the weak-field approximation of the spherically symmetric, static solution, TeVeS reproduces the
MOND acceleration formula;
- TeVeS avoids the problems of earlier attempts to generalize MOND, such as superluminal propagation;
- As it is a relativistic theory it can accommodate gravitational lensing.
The theory is based on the following ingredients:
- A unit vector field;
- A dynamical scalar field;
- A nondynamical scalar field;
- A matter Lagrangian constructed using an alternate metric;
- An arbitrary dimensionless function.
^"...Socrates gurgling hemlock / On his dusty prison cot..."^
Socrates was ultimately sentenced to death by drinking a hemlock-based liquid.
^"...Giggling as he glimpsed a dikast's deformed ****;"^
Dikastes was a legal office in ancient Greece that signified, in the broadest sense, a judge or juror, but more particularly denotes the Attic functionary of the democratic period, who, with his colleagues, was constitutionally empowered to try to pass judgment upon all causes and questions that the laws and customs of his country found to warrant judicial investigation.
^"Nietzsche tenured for philology / At Basel;"^
Nietzsche received a remarkable offer to become professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He was only 24 years old and had neither completed his doctorate nor received a teaching certificate. Despite the fact that the offer came at a time when he was considering giving up philology for science, he accepted. To this day, Nietzsche is still among the youngest of the tenured Classics professors on record.
^"Nietzsche feverishly etching / Fick diese scheiße! in a Jena clinic;"^
"Fick diese scheiße!" is German for "**** this ****!"
On January 6, 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day Overbeck received a similar letter and decided that Nietzsche's friends had to bring him back to Basel. Overbeck traveled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. By that time Nietzsche appeared fully in the grip of a serious mental illness, and his mother Franziska decided to transfer him to a clinic in Jena under the direction of Otto Binswanger. From November 1889 to February 1890, the art historian Julius Langbehn attempted to cure Nietzsche, claiming that the methods of the medical doctors were ineffective in treating Nietzsche's condition.
^"...Saratov / Circa 1942;"^
During World War II, Saratov was a station on the North-South Volzhskaya Rokada, a specially designated military railroad providing troops, ammunition and supplies to Stalingrad.