sitting on a stone
-grassless
-hopless
and you call yourself a grasshopper!
I know I shouldn’t, but I anthropomorphize.
I can’t see this orangutan without hearing the words,
“Ya borin’ me!”
play in my mind
parents lunged to cover impressionable eyes,
but someday they will be adults
who wonder about the mechanics
of how baby giraffes get made
Dear Flamingos,
Stop hiding your heads.
It freaks out the tourists,
making them think there is a pile of heads in some other corner of the Zoo.
Taken in December of 2011 at Andersonville National Historic Site / Andersonville National Cemetery
Hear the “schwoop-CLACK-schwoop-CLACK” of an automated loom playing in steady, relentless repetition. It’s an iron machine, but listen to those wooden parts clap against each other, the hardwood timbre. Note the metallic jingle, a subtle accompaniment. Strings, stretched out like the innards of a piano, ironically, remain silent as the tune plays around them.
Walking, one picks up the rhythm from one building to the next, wondering whether the machines are in synch, or if your mind deceives you that they play one tune.
All else, the horns and hollers, sing in discord.
Taken in December of 2011 in Albany, Georgia
Walking into the river,
sliding chin deep in the waters,
pulled, thrashing, toward the channel,
riding the rim of an undertow –
like astronauts slingshot around the moon.
Fond memories invade my mind,
steeling me for a dire fate,
but I’m ejected at the bend.
Clawing mud and gnarly roots,
I come out on the other side.
I think,
but without Descartes’ insistence that I am.
In fact, the more I think, the less confident I am about knowing what “being” means.
I think — without knowing,
and recognize the hazard of that condition.
It’s what got Socrates killed.
A smart person who claims to know may raise hackles,
but is dismissed as arrogant.
It’s the smart person who admits he doesn’t know…
[let’s hope I’m not wrongly classed among them]
… that’s the one who arouses murderous intent.
For what hope exists for priests, professors, or politicians —
or any of the many oracles of our age —
when the most astute confess that uncertainty is inescapable?
What airy sands are our castles built upon?
And, yet, I think.
Taken in October of 2012 in the countryside near Chiang Mai
Dream Machine (A Short Story) by Su-Yee Lin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This surreal short story is a reprint from “Day One” magazine that is available as a Kindle Single. The story is about a factory in an industrial part of Shanghai that seems to make metal objects / shapes, the purpose of which no one seems to understand. The protagonist is – at the start of the the story – the newest of the half-dozen employees who work at the plant. The story has a sparse feeling that ranges from the fact that the characters are designated only with a single letter to the fact that we really don’t get much indication of the broad and bustling city of Shanghai in which the story is supposedly set.
It isn’t easy to convey a world that isn’t quite right – seemingly like the world we are familiar with, but just a little off. I thought the author did a good job of this.
I enjoyed this story immensely. I thought the author used strategic ambiguity nicely. There are a few ways I believe one could reasonably interpret this story. If you are the kind that needs to have iron-clad clarity, that might be a bit aggravating. [If you’ve seen the Christopher Nolan movie “Inception,” and you liked that it left an open ending, this story is for you. If you insist that there is no ambiguity to the ending and that the top definitely toppled or didn’t, you might not enjoy it as much.]
