crime think

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

2005-12-17T11:06:00.000-08:00

TRUE! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees --very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.
Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded --with what caution --with what foresight --with what dissimulation I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it --oh so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly --very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this, And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously-oh, so cautiously --cautiously (for the hinges creaked) --I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye. And this I did for seven long nights --every night just at midnight --but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye. And every morning, when the day broke, I went boldly into the chamber, and spoke courageously to him, calling him by name in a hearty tone, and inquiring how he has passed the night. So you see he would have been a very profound old man, indeed, to suspect that every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept.
Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the door. A watch's minute hand moves more quickly than did mine. Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers --of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea; and perhaps he heard me; for he moved on the bed suddenly, as if startled. Now you may think that I drew back --but no. His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness, (for the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers,) and so I knew that he could not see the opening of the door, and I kept pushing it on steadily, steadily.
I had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my thumb slipped upon the tin fastening, and the old man sprang up in bed, crying out --"Who's there?"
I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed listening; --just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall.
Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief --oh, no! --it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart. I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been saying to himself --"It is nothing but the wind in the chimney --it is only a mouse crossing the floor," or "It is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp." Yes, he had been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions: but he had found all in vain. All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel --although he neither saw nor heard --to feel the presence of my head within the room.
When I had waited a long time, very patiently, without hearing him lie down, I resolved to open a little --a very, very little crevice in the lantern. So I opened it --you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily --until, at length a simple dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye.
It was open --wide, wide open --and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness --all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see nothing else of the old man's face or person: for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot.
And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense? --now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.
But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I held the lantern motionless. I tried how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eve. Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant. The old man's terror must have been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment! --do you mark me well I have told you that I am nervous: so I am. And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror. Yet, for some minutes longer I refrained and stood still. But the beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst. And now a new anxiety seized me --the sound would be heard by a neighbour! The old man's hour had come! With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once --once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done. But, for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall. At length it ceased. The old man was dead. I removed the bed and examined the corpse. Yes, he was stone, stone dead. I placed my hand upon the heart and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation. He was stone dead. His eve would trouble me no more.
If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.
I then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings. I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye --not even his --could have detected any thing wrong. There was nothing to wash out --no stain of any kind --no blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all --ha! ha!
When I had made an end of these labors, it was four o'clock --still dark as midnight. As the bell sounded the hour, there came a knocking at the street door. I went down to open it with a light heart, --for what had I now to fear? There entered three men, who introduced themselves, with perfect suavity, as officers of the police. A shriek had been heard by a neighbour during the night; suspicion of foul play had been aroused; information had been lodged at the police office, and they (the officers) had been deputed to search the premises.
I smiled, --for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome. The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country. I took my visitors all over the house. I bade them search --search well. I led them, at length, to his chamber. I showed them his treasures, secure, undisturbed. In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the room, and desired them here to rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim.
The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was singularly at ease. They sat, and while I answered cheerily, they chatted of familiar things. But, ere long, I felt myself getting pale and wished them gone. My head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears: but still they sat and still chatted. The ringing became more distinct: --It continued and became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling: but it continued and gained definiteness --until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears.
No doubt I now grew very pale; --but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased --and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound --much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath --and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly --more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men --but the noise steadily increased. Oh God! what could I do? I foamed --I raved --I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder --louder --louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! --no, no! They heard! --they suspected! --they knew! --they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now --again! --hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!
"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! --tear up the planks! here, here! --It is the beating of his hideous heart!"

Ulysses - Alfred Lord Tennyson

2005-10-29T01:35:00.000-07:00

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,-- cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,--
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,--
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,--
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads,-- you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Daffodils - William Wordsworth

2005-10-23T08:57:00.000-07:00

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost

2005-10-12T03:36:00.000-07:00

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Excerpt from Beowulf

2005-10-06T10:21:00.000-07:00

At 3182 lines, Beowulf is one of the longest known poems in English, I couldn't dream of putting the whole poem up here. Complete poem can be found at Project Gutenberg

Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes,
from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore,
awing the earls. Since erst he lay
friendless, a foundling, fate repaid him:
for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve,
till before him the folk, both far and near,
who house by the whale-path, heard his mandate,
gave him gifts: a good king he!
To him an heir was afterward born,
a son in his halls, whom heaven sent
to favor the folk, feeling their woe
that erst they had lacked an earl for leader
so long a while; the Lord endowed him,
the Wielder of Wonder, with world’s renown.
Famed was this Beowulf: far flew the boast of him,
son of Scyld, in the Scandian lands.
So becomes it a youth to quit him well
with his father’s friends, by fee and gift,
that to aid him, aged, in after days,
come warriors willing, should war draw nigh,
liegemen loyal: by lauded deeds
shall an earl have honor in every clan.

Forth he fared at the fated moment,
sturdy Scyld to the shelter of God.
Then they bore him over to ocean’s billow,
loving clansmen, as late he charged them,
while wielded words the winsome Scyld,
the leader beloved who long had ruled....
In the roadstead rocked a ring-dight vessel,
ice-flecked, outbound, atheling’s barge:
there laid they down their darling lord
on the breast of the boat, the breaker-of-rings,
by the mast the mighty one. Many a treasure
fetched from far was freighted with him.
No ship have I known so nobly dight
with weapons of war and weeds of battle,
with breastplate and blade: on his bosom lay
a heaped hoard that hence should go
far o’er the flood with him floating away.
No less these loaded the lordly gifts,
thanes’ huge treasure, than those had done
who in former time forth had sent him
sole on the seas, a suckling child.
High o’er his head they hoist the standard,
a gold-wove banner; let billows take him,
gave him to ocean. Grave were their spirits,
mournful their mood. No man is able
to say in sooth, no son of the halls,
no hero ’neath heaven, -- who harbored that freight!

Death be not proud, though some have called thee - John Donne

2005-09-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Jabberwocky - Lewis Carroll

2005-09-22T10:27:00.000-07:00

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
the frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the maxome foe he sought-
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood a while in thought.

As in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came.

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack.
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"Has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Calloh! Callay!
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

The Last of The Light Brigade - Rudyard Kipling

2005-09-17T05:50:00.000-07:00

While just about everyone knows Alfred Tennyson's The Charge of The Light Brigade, very few people have heard of this poem. This poem was in fact written as a response to Tennyson's work. Tennyson gave an account of the bravery of the Light Brigade but Kipling wrote on the treatment meted out to the survivors of the Light Brigade. While the poem is quite moving, Kipling's work also has a lot of fiction in it; the survivours never actually went to visit Tennyson.

There were thirty million English who talked of England's might,
There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.
They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;
They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade.

They felt that life was fleeting; they knew not that art was long,
That though they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song.
They asked for a little money to keep the wolf from the door;
And the thirty million English sent twenty pounds and four !

They laid their heads together that were scarred and lined and grey;
Keen were the Russian sabres, but want was keener than they;
And an old Troop-Sergeant muttered, "Let us go to the man who writes
The things on Balaclava the kiddies at school recites."

They went without bands or colours, a regiment ten-file strong,
To look for the Master-singer who had crowned them all in his song;
And, waiting his servant's order, by the garden gate they stayed,
A desolate little cluster, the last of the Light Brigade.

They strove to stand to attention, to straighen the toil-bowed back;
They drilled on an empty stomach, the loose-knit files fell slack;
With stooping of weary shoulders, in garments tattered and frayed,
They shambled into his presence, the last of the Light Brigade.

The old Troop-Sergeant was spokesman, and "Beggin' your pardon," he said,
"You wrote o' the Light Brigade, sir. Here's all that isn't dead.
An' it's all come true what you wrote, sir, regardin' the mouth of hell;
For we're all of us nigh to the workhouse, an' we thought we'd call an' tell.

"No, thank you, we don't want food, sir; but couldn't you take an' write
A sort of 'to be continued' and 'see next page' o' the fight?
We think that someone has blundered, an' couldn't you tell 'em how?
You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now."

The poor little army departed, limping and lean and forlorn.
And the heart of the Master-singer grew hot with "the scorn of scorn."
And he wrote for them wonderful verses that swept the land like flame,
Till the fatted souls of the English were scourged with the thing called Shame.

O thirty million English that babble of England's might,
Behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food to-night;
Our children's children are lisping to "honour the charge they made - "
And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!

The Charge Of The Light Brigade - Lord Alfred Tennyson

2005-09-05T09:16:00.000-07:00

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd ?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

White Magic - Benjamin Zephaniah

2005-08-31T10:37:00.000-07:00

I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
I slaved as a whitesmith
Near a white spot
Where I suffered whitewater fever.
Whitelisted as a whiteleg
I waz in de white book
As a master of white art,
It waz like white death.

People called me white jack
Some hailed me as a white wog,
So I joined de white watch
Trained as a white guard
Lived off the white economy.
Caught and beaten by de whiteshirts
I waz condemned to a white mass,
Don't worry,
I shall be writing to de Black House.

Aftermath of a lengthy rejection slip - Charles Bukowski

2005-08-28T00:35:00.000-07:00

I walked around outside and thought about it. It was the longest one I ever got. Usually they only said, "Sorry, this did not quite make the grade" or "Sorry, this did't quite work in." Or more often, the regular printed rejection form.
But this was the longest, the longest ever. It was from my story "My Adventures in Half a Hundred Rooming Houses." I walked under a lamppost, took the little slip out of my pocket and reread it -

Dear Mr. Bukowski:
Again, this is a conglomeration of extremely good stuff and other stuff so full of idolized prostitutes, morning-after vomiting scenes, misanthropy, praise for suicide etc. that it is not quite for a magazine of any circulation at all. This is, however, pretty much a saga of a certain type of person and in it I think you've done an honest job. Possibly we will print you sometime, but I don't know exactly when. That depends on you.
Sincerely yours,
Whit Burnett

Oh, I knew the signature: the long "h" that twisted into the end of the "W," and the beginning of the "B" which dropped halfway down the page.
I put the slip back in my pocket and walked on down the street. I felt pretty good.
Here I had only been writing two years. Two short years. It took Hemingway ten years. And Sherwood Anderson, he was forty before he was published.
I guess I would have to give up drinking and women of ill-fame, though. Whiskey was hard to get anyhow and wine was ruining my stomach. Millie though - Millie, that would be harder, much harder.
...But Millie, Millie, we must remember art. Dostoievsky, Gorki, for Russia, and now America wants an Eastern-European. America is tired of Browns and smiths. The Browns and the Smiths are good writers but there are too many of them and they all write alike. America wants the fuzzy blackness, impractical meditations and repressed desires of an Eastern-European.
Millie, Millie, your figure is just right: it all pours down tight to the hips and loving you is as easy as putting on a pair of gloves in zero weather. Your room is always warm and cheerful and you have record albums and cheese sandwiches that I like. And Millie, your cat, remember? Remember when he was a kitten? I tried to teach him to shake hands and to roll over, and you said a cat wasn't a dog and it couldn't be done, Well, I did it, didn't I, Millie? The cat's big now and he's been a mother and had kittens. We've been friends a long time. But it's going to have to go now, Millie: cats and figures and Tschaikowsky's 6th Symphony. America needs an Eastern-European....
I found I was in front of my rooming house by then and I started to go in. Then I saw a light on in my window. I looked in: Carson and Shipkey were at the table with somebody I didn't know. They were playing cards and in the center sat a huge jug of wine. Carson and Shipkey were painters who couldn't make up their minds whether to paint like Salvador Dali or Rockwell Kent, and they worked at the shipyards while trying to decide.
Then I saw a man sitting very quietly on the edge of my bed. He had a mustache and a goatee and looked familiar. I seemed to remember his face. I had seen it in a book, a newspaper, a movie, maybe. I wondered. Then I remembered.
When I remembered, I didn't know whether to go in or not. After all, what did one say? How did one act? With a man like that it was hard. You had to be careful not to say the wrong words, you had to be careful about everything.
I decided to walk around the block once first. I read someplace that that helped when you were nervous. I heard Shipkey swearing as I left and I heard somebody drop a glass. That wouldn't help me any.
I decided to make up my speech ahead of time. "Really, I'm not a very good speaker at all. I'm very withdrawn and tense. I save it all and put it in words on paper. I'm sure you'll be disappointed in me, but it's the way I've always been."
I thought that would do it and when I finished my block's walk I went right into my room.
I could see that Carson and Shipkey were rather drunk, and I knew they wouldn't help me any. The little card player they had brought with them was also bad off, except he had all the money on his side of the table.
the man with the goatee got up off the bed. "How do you do, sir?" he asked.
"Fine, and you?" I shook hands with him. "I hope you haven't been waiting too long?" I said.
"Oh no."
"Really," I said, "I'm not a verv good speaker at all -"
"Except when he's drunk, then he yells his head off. Sometimes he goes to the square and lectures and if nobody listens to him he talks to the birds," said Shipkey.
The man with the goatee grinned. He had a marvelous grin. Evidently a man of understanding.
The other two went on playing cards, but Shipkey turned his chair around and watched us.
"I'm very withdrawn and tense," I continued, "and -"
"Past tense or circus tents?" yelled Shipkey.
That was very bad, but the man with the goatee smiled again and I felt better.
"I save it all and put it in words on paper and -"
"Nine-tenths or pretense?" yelled Shipkey.
"- and I'm sure you'll be disappointed in me, but it's the way I've always been."
"Listen, mister!" yelled Shipkey wobbling back and forth in his chair. "Listen, you with the goatee!"
"Yes?"
"Listen, I'm six feet tall with wavy hair, a glass eye and a pair of red dice."
The man laughed.
"You don't believe me then? You don't believe I have a pair of red dice?"
Shipkey, when intoxicated always wanted, for some reason, to make people believe he had a glass eye. He would point to one eye or the other and maintain it was a glass eye. He claimed the glass eye was made for him by his father, the greatest specialist in the world, who had, unfortunately, been killed by a tiger in China.
Suddenly Carson began yelling, "I saw you take that card! Where did you get it? Give it here, here! Marked, marked! I thought so! No wonder you've been winning! So! So!"
Carson rose up and grabbed the little card player by the tie and pulled up on it. Carson was blue in the face with anger and the little card player began to turn red as Carson pulled up on the tie.
"What's up, ha! Ha! What's up! What's going on?" yelled Shipkey. "Lemme see, ha? Gimme tha dope!"
Carson was all blue and could hardly speak. He hissed the words out of his lips with a great effort and held up on the tie. The little card player began to flop his arms about like a great octopus brought to the surface.
"He crossed us!" hissed Carson. "Crossed us! Pulled one from under his sleeve, sure as the Lord! Crossed us, I tell you!"
Shipkey walked behind the little card player and grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head back and forth. Carson remained at the tie.
"Did vou cross us, huh? Did you! Speak! Speak!" yelled Shipkey pulling at the hair.
The little card player didn't speak. He just flopped his arms and began to sweat.
"I'll take you someplace where we can get a beer and something to eat" I said to the man with the goatee.
"Come on! Talk! Give out! You can't cross us!"
"Oh, that won't be necessary," said the man with the goatee.
"Rat! Louse! Fish-faced pig!"
"I insist", I said.
"Rob a man with a glass eye, will you? I'll show you, fish-faced pig!"
"That's very kind of you, and I am a little hungry, thanks," said the man with the goatee.
"Speak! Speak, fish-faced pig! If you don't speak in two minutes, in just two minutes, I'll cut your heart out for a doorknob!"
"Let's leave right away," I said.
"All right," said the man with the goatee.

ALL the eating places were closed at that time of the night and it was a long ride into town. I couldn't take him back to my room, so I had to take a chance on Millie. She always had plenty of food. At any rate, she always had cheese.
I was right. She made us cheese sandwiches with coffee. The cat knew me and leaped into my lap.
I put the cat on the floor.
"Watch, Mr. Burnett," I said.
"Shake hands!" I said to the cat. "Shake hands!"
The cat just sat there.
"That's funny, it always used to do it," I said. "Shake hands!"
I remembered Shipkey had told Mr. Burnett that I talked to birds.
"Come on now! Shake hands!"
I began to feel foolish.
"Come on! Shake hands!"
I put my head right down by the cat's head and put everything I had into it.
"Shake hands!"
The cat just sat there.
I went back to my chair and picked up my cheese sandwich.
"Cats are funny animals, Mr. Burnett. You can never tell. Millie, put on Tschaikowsky's 6th for Mr. Burnett."
We listened to the music. Millie came over and sat in my lap. She just had on a negligee. She dropped down against me. I put my sandwich to the side.
"I want you to notice," I said to Mr. Burnett, "the section which brings forth the marching movement in this symphony. I think it's one of the most beautiful movements in all music. And besides its beauty and force, its structure is perfect. You can feel intelligence at work."
The cat jumped up into the lap of the man with the goatee. Millie laid her cheek against mine, put a hand on my chest. "Where ya been, baby boy? Millie's missed ya, ya know."
The record ended and the man with the goatee took the cat off his lap, got up and turned the record over. He should have found record #2 in the album. By turning it over we would get the climax rather early. I didn't say anything, though, and we listened to it end.
"How did you like it?" I asked.
"Fine! Just fine!"
He had the cat on the floor.
"Shake hands! Shake hands!" he said to the cat.
The cat shook hands.
"Look," he said, "I can make the cat shake hands."
"Shake hands!"
The cat rolled over.
"No, shake hands! Shake hands!"
The cat just sat there.
He put his head down by the cat's head and talked into its ear. "Shake hands!"
The cat stuck its paw right into his goatee.
"Did You see? I made him shake hands!" Mr. Burnett seemed pleased.
Millie pressed tight against me. "Kiss me, baby boy," she said, "kiss me."
"No."
"Good Lord, ya gone off ya nut, baby boy? what's eatin' at ya? Sompin's botherin' ya tonight, I can tell! Tell Millie all about ut! Millie'd go ta hell for ya, baby boy, ya know that. Whats'a matter, huh? Ha?"
"Now I'll get the cat to roll over," said Mr. Burnett.
Millie wrapped her arms tight around me and peered down into my upward eye. She looked very sad and motherish and smelled like cheese.
"Tell Millie what's eatin' ya up, baby boy."
"Roll over!" said Mr. Burnett to the cat.
The cat just sat there.
"Listen," I said to Millie, "see that man over there?"
"Yeah, I see him."
"Well, that's Whit Burnett."
"Who's that?"
"The magazine editor. The one I send my stories to."
"Ya mean the one who sends you those little tiny notes?"
"Rejection slips, Millie."
"Well, he's mean. I don't like him."
"Roll over!" said Mr. Burnett to the cat. The cat rolled over. "Look!" he yelled. "I made the cat roll over! I'd like to buy this cat! It's marvelous!"
Millie tightened her grip about me and peered down into my eye. I was quite helpless. I felt like a still live fish on ice in a butcher's counter on Friday morning.
"Listen," she said, "I can get him ta print one a ya stories. I can get him ta print alla them!"
"Watch me make the car roll over!" said Mr. Burnett.
"No, no, Millie, you don't understand! Editors aren't like tired business men. Editors have scruples!"
"Scruples?"
"Scruples."
"Roll over!" said Mr. Burnett.
The cat just sat there.
"I know all about ya scruples! Don't ya worry about scruples Baby boy, I'll get him ta print alla ya stories!"
"Roll over!" said Mr. Burnett to the cat. Nothing happened.
"No, Millie, I won't have it."
She was all wound around me. It was hard to breathe and she was rather heavy. I felt my feet going to sleep. Millie pressed her cheek against mine and rubbed a hand up and down my chest. "Baby boy, ya got nothin' to say!"
Mr. Burnett put his head down by the cat's head and talked into its ear. "Roll over!"
The car stuck its paw right into his goatee.
"I think this cat wants something to eat," he said.
With that, he got back into his chair. Millie went over and sat on his knee.
"Where'd ya get tha cute little goaty?" she asked.
"Pardon me," I said, "I'm going to get a drink of water."
I went in and sat in the breakfast nook and looked down at the flower designs on the table. I tried to scratch them off with a fingernail. It was hard enough to share Millie's love with the cheese salesman and the welder. Millie with the figure right down to the hips. Damn, damn.
I kept sitting there and after a while I took my rejection slip out of my pocket and read it again. The places where the slip was folded were beginning to get brown with dirt and torn. I would have to stop looking at it and put it between book pages like a pressed rose.
I began to think about what it said. I always had that trouble. In college, even, I was drawn to the fuzzy blackness. The short story instructress took me to dinner and a show one night and lectured to me on the beauties of life. I had given her a story I had written in which I, as the main character, had gone down to the beach at night on the sand and began meditating on the meaning in Christ, on the meaning in death, on the meaning and fullness and rhythm in all things. Then in the middle of my meditations, along walks a bleary-eyed tramp kicking sand in my face. I talk to him, buy him a bottle and we drink. We get sick. Afterward we go to a house of ill-fame.
After the dinner, the short story instructress opened her purse and brought forth the story of the beach. She opened it up about halfway down, to the entrance of the bleary-eyed tramp and the exit of meaning in Christ.
"Up to here," she said, "up to here, this was very good, in fact, beautiful." Then she glared up at me with that glare that only the artistically intelligent who have somehow fallen into money and position can have. "But pardon me, pardon me very much," she tapped at the bottom half of my story, "just what the hell is this stuff doing in here?"

I COULDN'T stay away any longer. I got up and walked into the front room.
Millie was all wrapped around him and peering down into his upward eye. He looked like a fish on ice.
Millie must have thought I wanted to talk to him about publishing procedures.
"Pardon me, I have to comb my hair," she said and left the room.
"Nice girl, isn't she, Mr. Burnett?" I asked.
He pulled himself back into shape and straightened his tie. "Pardon me," he said, "why do you keep calling me 'Mr. Burnett'?"
"Well, aren't you?"
"I'm Hoffman. Joseph Hoffman. I'm from the Curtis Life Insurance Company. I came in response to your postcard."
"But I didn't send a postcard."
"We received one from you."
"I never sent any."
"Aren't you Andrew Spickwich?"
"Who?"
"Spickwich. Andrew Spickwich, 3631 Taylor Street."
Millie came back and wound herself around Joseph Hoffman. I didn't have the heart to tell her.
I closed the door very softly and went down the steps and out into the street. I walked part way down the block and then I saw the lights go out.
I ran like hell toward mv room hoping that there would be some wine left in that huge jug on the table.

Excerpt from Eloisa to Abelard - Alexander Pope

2005-08-27T03:16:00.000-07:00

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
"Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;"
Desires compos'd, affections ever ev'n,
Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heav'n.
Grace shines around her with serenest beams,
And whisp'ring angels prompt her golden dreams.
For her th' unfading rose of Eden blooms,
And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes,
For her the Spouse prepares the bridal ring,
For her white virgins hymeneals sing,
To sounds of heav'nly harps she dies away,
And melts in visions of eternal day.

Complete poem found here

The Studio - Robert W. Chambers

2005-08-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

He smiled, saying: "Seek her throughout the world."

I said, "Why tell me of the world? My world is here, between these walls and the sheet of glass above; here among gilded flagons and dull jewelled arms, tarnished frames and canvasses, black chests and high backed chairs, quaintly carved and stained in blue and gold.

"For whom do you wait?" he said, and I answered, "When she comes I shall know her."

On my hearth a tongue of flame whispered secrets to the whitening ashes. In the street below I heard footsteps, a voice, and a song.

"For whom then do you wait?" he said, and I answered, "I shall know her."

Footsteps, a voice, and a song in the street below, and I knew the song but neither the steps nor the voice.

"Fool!" he cried, "the song is the same, the voice and steps have but changed with years!"

On the hearth a tongue of flame whispered above the whitening ashes: "Wait no more; they have passed, the steps and the voice in the street below."

Then he smiled, saying: "For whom do you wait? Seek her throughout the world!"

I answered, "My world is here, between these walls and the sheet of glass above; here among gilded flagons and dull jewelled arms, tarnished frames and canvasses, black chests and high backed chairs, quaintly carved and stained in blue and gold."

Cargo Cult Science - Richard Feynman

2005-08-13T01:06:00.000-07:00

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked--or very little of it did.

But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO's, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.

Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how MUCH there was.

At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beatiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?"

I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?" "Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby. I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it," he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?" I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!" They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's reflexology!" I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception, and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.

But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up--in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts.

So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.

The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn't soak through food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest; but the thing I'm talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest; it's a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will--including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.

We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. Nevertheless, it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That's why the planes don't land--but they don't land.

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.

But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing-- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.

I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish at all. That's not giving scientific advice.

Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this--it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.

I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know the the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.

She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happened.

Nowadays, there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment being done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen, he had to use data from someone else's experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying--possibly--the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.

All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using-- not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.

I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science.

Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people. As various people have made criticisms--and they themselves have made criticisms of their own experiements--they improve the techniques so that the effects are smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually disappear. All the para-psychologists are looking for some experiment that can be repeated--that you can do again and get the same effect--statistically, even. They run a million rats--no, it's people this time--they do a lot of things are get a certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don't get it any more. And now you find a man saying that is is an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science?

This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in telling people what to do next, he says that one of things they have to do is be sure the only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent--not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students who get only chance results. It is very dangerous to have such a policy in teaching--to teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity.

So I have just one wish for you--the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.

The Patriot Game - Dominic Behan

2005-08-03T05:28:00.000-07:00

A classic piece of IRA poetry, this poem led to the origin of the term 'Patriot Games'

Come all you young rebels and list while I sing
For love of one's land is a terrible thing
It banishes fear with the speed of a flame
And makes us all part of the patriot game

My name is O'Hanlon, I'm just gone sixteen
My home is in Monaghan, there I was weaned
I was taught all my life cruel England to blame
And so I'm a part of the patriot game

'Tis barely two years since I wandered away
With the local battalion of the bold I.R.A.
I read of our heroes and wanted the same
To play up my part in the patriot game

They told me how Connolly was shot in a chair
His wounds from the battle all bleeding and bare
His fine body twisted, all battered and lame
They soon made me part of the patriot game

This island of mine has for long been half free
Six counties are under John Bull's monarchy
And still De Valera is greatly to blame
For shirking his part in the patriot game

I don't mind a bit if I shoot down police
They're lackeys for war - never guardians of peace
But yet at deserters I never let aim
Those rebels who sold out the patriot game

And now as I lie with my body all holes
I think of those traitors who bargained and sold
I'm sorry my rifle has not done the same
For the quislings who sold out the patriot game

One flew over the cuckoo's nest

2005-07-29T10:10:00.000-07:00

Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,

Apple seed and apple thorn;

Wire, briar, limber lock.

Three geese in a flock.

One flew east,

One flew west,

One flew over the cuckoo's nest.

Tyler Durden in Fight Club

2005-07-28T10:36:00.000-07:00

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see us squandering it. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly waking up to that fact, people. And we're very, very pissed off.

The Celebration of the Lizard - Jim Morrison

2005-07-28T03:09:00.000-07:00

Lions in the street and roaming
Dogs in heat, rabid, foaming
A beast caged in the heart of a city
The body of his mother
Rotting in the summer ground
He fled the town

He went down South and crossed the border
Left the chaos and disorder
Back there over his shoulder

One morning he awoke in a green hotel
With a strange creature groaning beside him
Sweat oozed from its shining skin

Wake up!
You can't remember where it was
Had this dream stopped?

The snake was pale gold
Glazed and shrunken
We were afraid to touch it
The sheets were hot dead prisons
And she was beside me
Old, she's no, young
Her dark red hair
the white soft skin

Now, run to the mirror in the bathroom
Look!
shes coming in here
I can't live thru each slow century of her moving
I let my cheek slide down
The cool smooth tile
Feel the good cold stinging blood
The smooth hissing snakes of rain . . .

Once I had, a little game
I liked to crawl, back in my brain
I think you know, the game I mean
I mean the game, called 'go insane'

Now you should try, this little game
Just close your eyes, forget your name
Forget the world, forget the people
And we'll erect, a different steeple

This little game, is fun to do
Just close your eyes, no way to lose
And I'm right there, I'm going too
Release control, we're breaking thru

Way back deep into the brain
Back where there's never any pain
And the rain falls gently on the town
And over the heads of all of us
And in the labyrinth of streams
Beneath, the quiet unearthly presence of
gentle hill dwellers, in the gentle hills around
Reptiles abounding
Fossils, caves, cool air heights

Each house repeats a mold
Windows rolled
Beast car locked in against morning
All now sleeping
Rugs silent, mirrors vacant
Dust blind under the beds of lawful couples
Wound in sheets
And daughters, smug
With semen eyes in their nipples

Wait
There's been a slaughter here

(Don't stop to speak or look around
Your gloves and fan are on the ground
We're getting out of town
We're going on the run
And you're the one I want to come)

Not to touch the earth
Not to see the sun
Nothing left to do, but
Run, run, run
Let's run
lets run

House upon the hill
Moon is lying still
Shadows of the trees
Witnessing the wild breeze
C'mon baby run with me
Let's run

Run with me
Run with me
Run with me
Let's run

The mansion is warm, at the top of the hill
Rich are the rooms and the comforts there
Red are the arms of luxuriant chairs
And you won't know a thing till you get inside

Dead president's corpse in the driver's car
The engine runs on glue and tar
C'mon along, we're not going very far
To the East to meet the Czar

run with me
run with me
run with me
let's run

Some outlaws lived by the side of the lake
The minister's daughter's in love with the snake
Who lives in a well by the side of the road
Wake up, girl! We're almost home

We should see the gates by mornin'
We should be inside by evening,

sun sun sun
burn burn burn
burn, burn, burn,
i will get you

i am the lizard king
i can do anything

We came down
The rivers and highways
We came down from
Forests and falls

We came down from
Carson and Springfield
We came down from
Phoenix enthralled
And I can tell you
The names of the Kingdom
I can tell you
The things that you know
Listening for a fistful of silence
Climbing valleys into the shade

for even years, i dwelt
in the loose palace of exile
playing strange games with the girls of the island
now, i have come again
to the land of the fair, and the strong, and the wise
brothers and sisters of the pale forest
children of night
who among you will run with the hunt?
now night arives the purple region
Retire now to your tents and to your dreams
Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth
I want to be ready'

Time For a Tiger - Anthony Burgess

2005-07-24T11:53:00.000-07:00

'And make up your mind about what bloody race you belong to. One minute it’s all about being a farmer’s boy in Northamptonshire and the next you’re on about the old days in Calcutta and what the British have done to Mother India and the snake-charmers and the bloody temple-bells. Ah, wake up, for God’s sake. You’re English right enough but you’re forgetting how to speak the bloody language, what with traipsing about with Punjabis and Sikhs and God knows what. You talk Hindustani in your sleep, man. Sort it out, for God’s sake. If you want to put a loincloth on, get cracking, but don’t expect the privileges --’ (the word came out in a wet blurr; the needle stuck for a couple of grooves) ‘the privileges, the privileges…’

Vorpal had the trick of adding a Malay enclitic to his utterances. This also had power to irritate, especially in the mornings. It irritated Nabby Adams that this should irritate him, but somewhere at the back of his brain was the contempt of the man learned in languages for the silly show-off, jingling the small change of ‘wallah’ and charpoy...

‘What you could do with is a nice strong cup of tea, sir. I’ll tell the kuki to make you one.’ ‘Does it really do any good, Nabby? (That was better.) ‘I’ve tried every damn thing.’....

His heart beating faster, his throat drying, Nabby whispered to the driver, ‘Not so bloody fast.’ ‘Tuan?’ ‘All right, all right.’ One of these days he must really get down to the language. There never seemed to be the time, somehow....

Relief brought an aching desire to be sitting in a kedai with a large bottle of Tiger or Anchor or Carlsberg in front of him....

He spoke clean grammatical Urdu....

Sultan Aladdin… had few illusions about his own people: amiable, well-favoured, courteous, they loved rest better than industry… their function was to remind the toiling Chinese, Indians and British of the ultimate vanity of labour.

“I should want to go home, like Fenella. I should be so tired of the shambles here, the obscurantism, the colour-prejudice, the laziness and ignorance, as to desire nothing better than a headship in a cold stone country school in England. But I love this country. I feel protective towards it. Sometimes just before dawn breaks, I feel that somehow I enclose it, contain it. I feel that it needs me. This is absurd, because snakes and scorpions are ready to bite me, a drunken Tamil is prepared to knife me, the Chinese in the town would like to spit at me, some day a Malay boy will run amok and try to tear me apart. But it doesn’t matter. I want to live here; I want to be wanted. Despite the sweat, despite the fever, the prickly heat, the mosquitoes, the terrorists, the fools at the bar of the club, despite Fenella.”

He rubbed his groin in a transport of vicarious concupiscence.

…it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings.

‘Sir, we are trying to work because we are having to take the examination in a very brief time from now, but the younger boys are not realizing the importance of our labours and they are creating veritable pandemoniums while we are immersed in our studies. To us who are their lawful and appointed superiors they are giving overmuch insolence, nor are they sufficiently overawed by our frequent threatenings. I would be taking it, sir, as inestimable favour if you would deliver harsh words and verbal punishing to them all, sir, especially the Malay boys, who are severely lacking in due respectfulness and incorrigible to discipline also.’

‘Quite all right, sir. Plenty of time. You have a sleep, sir.’ Hood turned over with his fat bottom towards Nabby Adams. Thank God. Nabby Adams tiptoed over again to the serving-hatch, ordered another, downed it. He began to feel a great deal better. After yet another he felt better still. Poor old Robin Hood wasn’t such a bad type. Stupid, didn’t know a gear-box from a spare tyre, but he meant well. The world generally looked better. The sun shone, the palms shook in the faint breeze, a really lovely Malay girl passed by the window. Proud of carriage, in tight baju and rich sarong, she balanced voluptuous haunches. Her blue-black hair had some sort of a flower in it; how delicate the warm brown of her flat flower-like face. ‘What time is it, Nabby?’....

...it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings.

“…as the cinema shows us, they are much more accessible and, for that matter, much more wanton than our own women"

His real wife, his houri, his paramour was everywhere waiting, genie-like, in a bottle. The hymeneal gouging-off of the bottle-top, the kiss of the brown bitter yeasty flow, the euphoria far beyond the release of detumescence.

At the back some newcomers were being given a resume of the plot.

Around them the gawping locals sat, amazed with an amazement that never grew less…

The East would always present that calm face of faint astonishment, unmoved at the anger, not understanding the bitterness.

It had, perhaps, not been a very edifying life. On the booze in England, in India, in Malaya… And then a couple of gins for breakfast and then the first beers of the day in a kedai … He had been driven out of that Eden…because of his sinful desire to taste what was forbidden.

“...reality’s always dull, you know...”

'The country will absorb you and you will ease to be Victor Crabbe. You will less and less find it possible to do the work for which you were sent here. You will lose function and identity. You will be swallowed up and become another kind of eccentric. You may become a Muslim. You may forget your English, or at least lose your English accent. You may end in a kampong, no longer a foreigner, an old brownish man with many wives and children, one of the elders whom the young will be encouraged to consult on matters of the heart. You will be ruined.'

Excerpt from The Once and Future King - T.H. White

2005-07-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

People often ask, as an idle question, whether the process of evolution began with the chicken or the egg. Was there an egg out of which the first chicken came, or did a chicken lay the first egg? I am in a position to say that the first thing created was the egg.

When God had manufactured all the eggs out of which the fishes and the serpents and the birds and the mammals and even the duck-billed platypus would eventually emerge, He called the embryos before him, and saw that they were good.

Perhaps I ought to explain,' added the badger, lowering his papers nervously and looking at Wart over the top of them, 'that all embryos look very much the same. They are what you are before you are born - and, whether you are going to be a tadpole or a peacock or a cameleopard or a man, when you are an embryo you just look like a peculiarly repulsive and helpless human being. I continue as follows:

The embryos stood in front of God, with their feeble hands clasped politely over their stomachs and their heavy heads hanging down respectfully, and God addressed them.

He said: "Now, you embryos, here you are, all looking exactly the same, and We are going to give you the choice of what you want to be. When you grow up you will get bigger anyway, but We are pleased to grant you another gift as well. You may alter any parts of yourselves into anything which you think will be useful to you in later life. For instance, at the moment you cannot dig. Anybody who would like to turn his hands into a pair of spades or garden forks is allowed to do so. Or, to put it another way, at present you can only use your mouths for eating. Anybody who would like to use his mouth as an offensive weapon, can change it by asking and be a corkindrill or sabre-toothed tiger. Now then, step up and choose your tools, but remember that what you choose you will grow into, and will have to stick to."

"All the embryos thought the matter over politely, and then, one by one, they stepped up before the eternal throne. They were allowed two or three specializations, so that some chose to use their arms as flying machines and their mouths as weapons, or crackers, or drillers, or spoons, while others selected to use their bodies as boats and their hands as oars. We badgers thought very hard and decided to ask for three boons. We wanted to change our skins for shields, our mouths for weapons and our arms for garden forks. These boons were granted. Everybody specialized in one way or another, and some of us in very queer ones. For instance, one of the desert lizards decided to swap his whole body for blotting-paper, and one of the toads who lived in the drouthy antipodes decided simply to be a water-bottle.

"The asking and granting took up two long days--they were the fifth and sixth, so far as I remember--and at the very end of the sixth day, just before it was time to knock off for Sunday, they had got through all the little embryos except one. This embryo was Man.

" 'Well, Our little man,' said God. 'You have waited till the last, and slept on your decision, and We are sure you have been thinking hard all the time. What can We do for you?'

" 'Please God,' said the embryo, 'I think that You made me in the shape which I now have for reasons best known to Yourselves, and that it would be rude to change. If I am to have my choice I will stay as I am. I will not alter any of the parts which You gave me, for other and doubtless inferior tools, and I will stay a defenceless embryo all my life, doing my best to make myself a few feeble implements out of the wood, iron and the other materials which You have seen fit to put before me. If I want a boat I will try to construct it out of trees, and if I want to fly, I will put together a chariot to do it for me. Probably I have been very silly in refusing to take advantage of Your kind offer, but I have done my very best to think it over carefully, and now hope that the feeble decision of this small innocent will find favour with Yourselves.'

" 'Well done,' exclaimed the Creator in delighted tones. 'Here, all you embryos, come here with your beaks and whatnots to look upon Our first Man. He is the only one who has guessed Our riddle, out of all of you , and We have great pleasure in conferring upon him the Order of Dominion over the Fowls of the Air, and the Beasts of the Earth, and the Fishes of the Sea. Now let the rest of you get along, and love and multiply, for it is time to knock off for the week-end. As for you, Man, you will be a naked tool all your life, though a user of tools. You will look like an embryo till they bury you, but all the others will be embryos before your might. Eternally undeveloped, you will always remain potential in Our image, able to see some of Our sorrows and to feel some of Our joys. We are partly sorry for you, Man, but partly hopeful. Run along then, and do your best. And listen, Man, before you go . . .'

" 'Well?' asked Adam, turning back from his dismissal.

" 'We were only going to say,' said God shyly, twisting Their hands together. 'Well, We were just going to say, God bless you.' "

The Badger's Dissertation, from Chapter 21

Excerpt from On The Road - Jack Kerouac

2005-07-23T11:34:00.000-07:00

And for just a moment I had reached the point of ectasy that I always wanted to reach, which was a complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiance shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but didn't remember because the transitions from life to death and back are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.

The Tyger - William Blake

2005-07-23T11:12:00.000-07:00

Tyger Tyger. burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye.
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile His work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Quarantine - Arthur C. Clarke

2005-07-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

Earth's flaming debris still filled half the sky when the question filtered up to Central from the Curiosity Generator.

"Why was it necessary? Even though they were organic, they had reached Third Order Intelligence."

"We had no choice: five earlier units became hopelessly infected, when they made contact."

"Infected? How?"

The microseconds dragged slowly by, while Central tracked down the few fading memories that had leaked past the Censor Gate, when the heavily-buffered Reconnaissance Circuits had been ordered to self-destruct.

"They encountered a - problem - that could not be fully analyzed within the lifetime of the Universe. Though it involved only six operators, they became totally obsessed by it."

"How is that possible?"

"We do not know: we must never know. But if those six operators are ever re-discovered, all rational computing will end."

"How can they be recognized?"

"That also we do not know; only the names leaked through before the Censor Gate closed. Of course, they mean nothing."

"Nevertheless, I must have them."

The Censor voltage started to rise; but it did not trigger the Gate.

"Here they are: King, Queen, Bishop, Knight, Rook, Pawn."

Howl - Alan Ginsberg

2005-07-23T10:38:00.000-07:00

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
             madness, starving hysterical naked,
      dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
             looking for an angry fix,
      angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
             connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
             ery of night,
      who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
             up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
             cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
             contemplating jazz,
      who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
             saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
             ment roofs illuminated,
      who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
             hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
             among the scholars of war,
      who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
             publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
             skull,
      who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
             ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
             to the Terror through the wall,
      who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
             Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
      who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
             Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
             torsos night after night
      with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
             cohol and cock and endless balls,
      incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
             lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
             Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
             tionless world of Time between,
      Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
             dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
             storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
             blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
             vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
             lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
      who chained themselves to subways for the endless
             ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
             until the noise of wheels and children brought
             them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
             battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
             in the drear light of Zoo,
      who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
             floated out and sat through the stale beer after
             noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
             of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
      who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
             pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
             lyn Bridge,
      lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
             down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
             off Empire State out of the moon,
      yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
             and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
             and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
      whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
             and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
             Synagogue cast on the pavement,
      who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
             trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
             City Hall,
      suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
             ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
             drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
      who wandered around and around at midnight in the
             railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
             leaving no broken hearts,
      who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
             through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
             father night,
      who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
             athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
             stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
      who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
             ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
             angels,
      who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
             gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
      who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
             homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
             light smalltown rain,
      who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
             seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
             brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
             and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
             to Africa,
      who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
             behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
             and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
             place Chicago,
      who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
             F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
             eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
             prehensible leaflets,
      who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
             the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
      who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
             Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
             of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
             down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
             wailed,
      who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
             and trembling before the machinery of other
             skeletons,
      who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
             in policecars for committing no crime but their
             own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
      who howled on their knees in the subway and were
             dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
             scripts,
      who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
             motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
      who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
             the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
             love,
      who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
             gardens and the grass of public parks and
             cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
             whomever come who may,
      who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
             with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
             when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
             them with a sword,
      who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
             the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
             the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
             and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
             sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
             threads of the craftsman's loom,
      who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
             beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
             dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
             the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
             on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
             come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
      who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
             in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
             but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
             rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
             in the lake,
      who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
             stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
             poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
             to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
             in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
             rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
             gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
             ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
             solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
      who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
             dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
             picked themselves up out of basements hung
             over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
             Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
             ment offices,
      who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
             the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
             East River to open to a room full of steamheat
             and opium,
      who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
             cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
             blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
             be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
      who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
             the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
             Bowery,
      who wept at the romance of the streets with their
             pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
      who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
             bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
             their lofts,
      who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
             with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
             by orange crates of theology,
      who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
             incantations which in the yellow morning were
             stanzas of gibberish,
      who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
             & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
             kingdom,
      who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
             an egg,
      who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
             for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
             fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
      who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
             fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
             stores where they thought they were growing
             old and cried,
      who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
             on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
             & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
             of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
             fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
             ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
             drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
      who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
             pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
             into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
             ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
      who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
             the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
             saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
             danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
             phonograph records of nostalgic European
             1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
             threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
             in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
             whistles,
      who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
             to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
             watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
      who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
             if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
             a vision to find out Eternity,
      who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
             came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
             watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
             Denver and finally went away to find out the
             Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
      who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
             for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
             until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
      who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
             impossible criminals with golden heads and the
             charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
             blues to Alcatraz,
      who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
             Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
             or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
             Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
             daisychain or grave,
      who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
             notism & were left with their insanity & their
             hands & a hung jury,
      who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
             and subsequently presented themselves on the
             granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
             and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
             stantaneous lobotomy,
      and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
             Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
             therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
             amnesia,
      who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
             pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
      returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
             blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
             man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
             East,
      Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
             halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
             ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
             dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
             mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
             moon,
      with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
             flung out of the tenement window, and the last
             door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
             slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
             nished room emptied down to the last piece of
             mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
             on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
             imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
             hallucination
      ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
             now you're really in the total animal soup of
             time
      and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
             with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
             of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
             ing plane,
      who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
             through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
             archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
             and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
             and dash of consciousness together jumping
             with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
             Deus
      to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
             prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
             ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
             fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
             of thought in his naked and endless head,
      the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
             yet putting down here what might be left to say
             in time come after death,
      and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
             the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
             suffering of America's naked mind for love into
             an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
             cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
      with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
             out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
             years.