IF ALL THE OCEANS WERE LEMONADE!
Climbs up on my lap
as if she were scaling an Alp
sits on my book like
she see the cat do
manoeuvres herself so
she is enthroned
on the lap
of the Dad.
Stabs a finger
at a bunch of words.
"What...say?!"
as if only I can hear
the words
voices.
"Well, it's interesting that
you ask...!"
I switch to another
bunch of words.
She's not to see
the sleight of mind,
"Charles Fourier
he say..."
I see the hope
leap into her eyes
as I translate the furry
man's thought.
"When all the world
and the people in the world
finally get to be
as nice as nice can be
all the oceans
with turn to lemonade.!"
She gasps.
Nods that that is how
things should be.
Leaves my knee
a devoted Fourierist.
The original bunch of words
she had chosen would be
that much harder
to explain.
That the moon was a dead mummy
that would eventually give way
to not one but five
living replacements.
An ocean of lemonade
lapping at the docks
splashing over rocks
chasing you up the beach
being the easier of
the thoughts to hold.
*
Then my little three year old treasure got down and danced to the Háry János Suite and became a mechanical little doll( "Wind me up..wind me up!" )to the strains of the Viennese Musical Clock before complaining that the trombones were pushing her about..life with a little girl is anything but dull!. She was enraged she couldn't read and ask "Why I can't hear what the words are saying!"
She would also listen to Joyce on record and not be a bit nonplussed at the Wake as she could make sense of the sound and wasn't put out by the stature of what she was hearing. I asked her what did she think the man with the funny voice was saying and she said "I think his granny just died like my granny died!" She was an epiphany!
Fourier's theoretical system, described by one scholar as "vast and eccentric, was only part of the output of what another called "a most riotous and unpruned imagination."
Fourier believed that in the new world people would live for 144 years, that new species of friendly and pacifistic animals such as "anti-lions" would emerge, and that over time human beings would develop long and useful tails.
Fourier also professed a belief in the ability of human souls to migrate between physical and "aromal" world. Such thinking was set aside during the last 15 years of Fourier's life, when he instead began to concentrate on testing his economic and social ideas.
Fourier's disciples, including Albert Brisbane and Victor Considerant, later pared down his writings into a comprehensible system for economic and social organization, with the Fourierist movement experiencing a brief boom in the United States during the mid-1840s, when some 30 Fourierist associations were established.