Prolepsis (WW III) | Temptation | The Shadow Knows

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* [Ciurana de Prades, Catalonia]: photo by Dimitris Makrygiannakis, 28 April 2018

* [Ciurana de Prades, Catalonia]: photo by Dimitris Makrygiannakis, 28 April 2018

* [Ciurana de Prades, Catalonia]: photo by Dimitris Makrygiannakis, 28 April 2018

Terpsithea V [Aryroupolis, Glyfada, Attica]: photo by andreas vekinis, sometime in 2014

 

Complicating? @hsfi @Shuttercock @Reuters: image via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThe Pix, 16 July 2018

WW III (*the capture)

A big dumb pushy blundering bossman may be exactly what Murica thinks it wants and needs

and that happens to also be exactly what the world would be correct in thinking Murica now so richly deserves

and needs especially that part of the world which can see the uses of playing the aforesaid bdpbb the way a predator

plays with its prey before closing in for the kill

Oh and by the way Th'Emp wishes you to know him

and Pooty however clear it is who's the stronger and smarter

they're always going to have one abiding and enduring love in common and when

they tell us that's Israel we understand this whole charade for what it is
for the one strategic convention spiked with the usual barbarian rudeness a simple backpass and trust the backwall 
for the other the dread proleptically anticipated counterattack preceding the decisive strike to the throat 

Visual leads for @NewYorker's two #TrumpPutinSummit stories. In tow, and cat eats canary. @bsmialowski @AFPphoto: image via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThe Pix, 16 July 2018 

Visual leads for @NewYorker's two #TrumpPutinSummit stories. In tow, and cat eats canary. @bsmialowski @AFPphoto: image via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThe Pix, 16 July 2018

 Temptation

DSCF2466sofi: photo by ilan Ben yehuda, 9 June 2018

DSCF2466sofi: photo by ilan Ben yehuda, 9 June 2018

DSCF2466sofi: photo by ilan Ben yehuda, 9 June 2018

* [kiryat hamlacha, tel aviv]: photo by Nadav Gazit, 3 January 2017

Kolkata, India: photo by f.d. walker, 9 May 2017

Kolkata, India: photo by f.d. walker, 9 May 2017

Kolkata, India: photo by f.d. walker, 9 May 2017

 Istanbul1: photo by Karsten Haug, 28 May 2018

Istanbul1: photo by Karsten Haug, 28 May 2018

Istanbul1: photo by Karsten Haug, 28 May 2018

The Shadow Knows

epa editor's choice 16 July 2018: Former US President Barack Obama (C) poses for photographs with his step-grandmother Sarah Onyango Obama (R) and an unidentified local student (L) during the of the Sauti Kuu Sports and Vocational Training Center in his ancestral home of Kogelo, some 400 kms west of the capital Nairobi, Kenya, 16 July 2018. The center was founded by his half-sister Auma Obama. #BarackObama #FormerUSPresident #SautiKuu #SautiKuuFoundation #AumaObama #Kogelo #Nairobi #Kenya #epaphotos Photo epa-efe / @daikurokawa: image via epaphotos @epaphotos, 16 July 2018

It's good to be back! The first time I came I was 27 years old and determined to learn about the life of my father and the culture of his people. That first night at Mama Sarah's gave me a sense of satisfaction no five star hotel could ever give. @BarackObama #SautiKuu: image via Gina Din @GinaDinGroup, 16 July 2018

 

epa editor's choice 13 July 2018   The 'Donald Trump Baby Blimp' balloon flies over Parliament Square during a protest in London, Britain, 13 July 2018. The inflatable 'Trump Baby' tied to a spot in Parliament Square is to kick off a day of protests against US President Donald J. Trump's visit. #DonaldTrump #DonaldTrumpUKVisit #Balloon #ParliamentSquare #Protest #London #Britain #epaphotos Photo epa-efe / Andy Rain: image via epaphotos @epaphotos, 13 July 2018


And the money shot. "What else can I tell you." #RussianHacking @dougmillsnyt @nytimes: image via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThe Pix, 16 July 2018 



If you're looking for a storyline, how about the relative focus of #Lavrov and #Pompeo? #TrumpPutinSummit @dougmillsnyt: image via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThe Pix, 16 July 2018  
 

He knows Trump goes to town on gifts like this. It also represented a worldwide victory lap--especially on the heels of NATO debacle. The games never end. @dougmillsnyt #TrumpPutin #RussiaWorldCup: image via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThe Pix, 16 July 2018


Absolute scenes in Parliament Sq right now #TrumpBaby: image via Elliot Wagland @elliotwagland, 13 July 2018


The #TrumpBaby is now upright #TrumpUKVisit: image via Elliot Wagland @elliotwagland, 13 July 2018



The #TrumpBaby blimp is almost inflated #TrumpUKVisit #TrumpBaby: image via Elliot Wagland @elliotwagland, 13 July 2018

 Prolepsis   

“In my end is my beginning,” said the grumbly, rumpled, combative charcoal black plastic and coathanger aeroplane manufacturing homeless guy from his circled wagon design studio and bag-and-box-man encampment under the city provided shelter awning outside Safeway.

Of course he wasn't really saying that, it's just what I'd heard, or thought I'd heard, a bit of freelance auto-suggestion provided on the spur of the moment and straight out of the blue by the cranial noodleroni and probably meant for no end higher than to enliven the final hours before dying, same old motiveless motive, or no, perhaps related to something I'd read, and then, lo! as I read so little these final days the path back to the original annoyance was quickly laid bare with a minimum of sorting-through the bushy irrelevances.   

One time perhaps years ago I had suggested to the aforesaid citizen his protruding oversize wagon handle was blocking the sidewalk, a pitiful objection perhaps but still, crippled pedestrians' rights and all yeah? I fall over on your claymore, I'm a dead man dude, grumbled I, hobbling past. Lèse majesté. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

E'er since as I stumble and mumble past we have little sidelong grumbleversations, often he will attempt to pawn off sacks and bags of rotten discarded food on me, while exacting retentive vengeance by grumblasking, for example, if I'm hearing correctly, words that sound a lot like like What, not dead yet? and when I answer You ought to get off this street my brother, he'll shake his head a bit annoyed like a beast grazing the rivermud, shaking off biting flies and testily rejoin, Why? and I'll say Get a bit of rest peace rest He'll shake his head again, water buffalo bothered by flies, and murmur This is where I live, Rest when I'm dead and if I try to answer he'll mutter, Don't talk to me, can't you see I'm working. And I'll say nothing and he'll say, now looking up just enough to allow his I don't care glance to graze for half one second contemptuously upon the crumpled plastic tucked into where the laces should be in my not spit shined, very crappy shoe, You were in the military weren't you?

He probably knows what autorotation is, as well. He means I should have enough residual military discipline to know to not talk to him when he's either breathing or working. What this means is he's still roosting on the claymore remark. (Once, when still able to get about a bit more broadly, I came upon him in the middle of the night, stretched unmoving and bundled in the familar-to-me shapeless no-color gaping-rent-slashed streetcoat upon the ground across a footpath that's the closest thing to a jungle trail in the neighborhood, his unprotected extremely vulnerable at that moment person fully and rashly exposed to phantasmal maybe-Charlie, the night and me.) Why that's interesting is that on this street, arterial route of White Schmoo World, up and down the street, nobody has any idea what a claymore is or was. Unless they do, and aren't saying, and are blending into the shadows outside the ice cream store in their american flag ballcaps and bermudas waiting to get in line with the millennial grandkids.

But as an obvious veteran setter up of defensive perimeters, my combative charcoal black doppelgänger fellow of the street seemed to be indicating to me, with his interestingly challenging remark, that he knows very well that his oversize wagon handle is a claymore, and if I should fall over and become a dead man dude, it would be but a short fall, and of no interest to anybody. He will have lost a quasi-willing recipient (easier to accept and transfer straight to trash than to incur his wrath by saying no) for the brown bags full of rancid food items which accumulate into massive heaps around him, as he manufactures the (estimated by him) maybe five thousandth homemade aeroplane of his 40 year career as the grumbling claymore-laying Howard Hughes of the street.

Eighty years ago today, a welcome parade for the aviator Howard Hughes was held along Broadway in lower Manhattan, after Hughes and his crew completed a flight around the world in less than four days.: image via AP Images @AP_Images, 15 July 2018

Some years back when we I first began to quarrel attempt mumbled grumbleversation over the traffic commotion I attempted to enquire about construction details of the craft he had underway at the moment. Pretty much all the same one to the next I had already suspected but still. Multiples, like. Elaborate things these were, he'd been (warning: proleptic construction: I'd later learn that) making and selling them practically forever. Propellors spinning and spinning in the breezeway wind tunnel coming up solano from san pablo and the bay, a full fledged fleet of windspun fidgetspinner craft. Spin, spin, spin.  A professional artificer. I told him my father having been turned down by the army due to high blood pressure (prolepsis) had been put to work as a draughtsman on the crew at Douglas Aircraft that was designing the DC 3 Dakota, a legendary bit of aeronautical design history. Grumble, shrug, don't talk to me; I took him to be registering the perception No Sale.

If you want it, take it.

I don't want it.

Then why are you talking to me.  

He is a super neat freak by the way. But back to the point here. Prolepsis is a way of getting what has not happened to happen before it happens. A literary trick. The Four Quartets for example is one long proleptic breakdown.  When Keats referred to Lorenzo as the murdered man several stanzas before Lorenzo's brothers had performed the dastardly deed and Lorenzo's head turned up in Isabella's Pot of Basil, Keats was merely being clever, he was a very clever boy, Charles Lamb had brought him into the delights of Boccaccio.

He meant nothing at all until his ghost was purchased in a second hand shop and brought back from the next world in the form of an inflated literary windbag, saying something vaguely specific about circularity and the spiritual journey he was undertaking between being murdered and having his head planted in a pot, but the line has more than one application, it works to designate certain tactics or challenges that poets may employ to jump-start their deficient imaginations. One such is to begin with a last line and then write the poem that leads up to it. Another is to retain the end words of an admirable poem, i.e. one somebody has told you to admire, scrap the rest, and fill in the blank space with one’s own poem, that is, the one that one has already just proleptically written, or found leaping into one's unsuspecting imagination! You're welcome to use this one!  Free propellors! Split the diff 40-60! No extra charge!

Let's call it "Claymore". And make it a mumbleversation on the theme of “In my end is my beginning,” so that the pre-inflated admirable Trump Baby balloon can easily enough be reversed upon itself to apply to the deflated admirable Trump Baby balloon. Can you spot the difference?

The Donald Trump baby blimp is being readied #TrumpUKVisit #TrumpBaby: image via Elliot Wagland @elliotwagland, 13 July 2018

 

 A plane battling the Ferguson Fire passes the setting sun yesterday in unincorporated Mariposa County Calif., near Yosemite National Park. Photo Noah Berger: image via AP Images @AP_Images, 16 July 2018