What if?
February 27, 2008
February 26, 2008
AIDS
The HIV virus
“Dying is simple,� she said, “what’s worst is the separation.�
When she no longer spoke, they lay alone together touching
and she fixed on him her beautiful enormous round brown eyes
Shining unblinking and passionate with love and dread
One by one they came, the oldest and dearest
to say goodbye to the friend of the heart
At first she said their names and touched
then she smiled then turned one mouth corner up
on the last day she stared silent goodbyes
with her hands curled and her eyes stuck open
leaving his place beside her where her eyes stared
he told her “I’ll put these letters in the box�
she had not spoken for three hours and now jane said her last words:
“okay�
At 8 that night, her eyes open as they stayed until she died.
Brain stem breathing started he bent to kiss her pale cool lips again
and felt them, one last time gather and purse and peck to kiss him back
In the last hours, she kept her forearms raised with pale fingers clenched at cheek level
like the goddess figure over the bathroom sink
Sometimes her right fist flicked or spasmed towards her face
For twelve hours until she died, he kept scratching Jane Kenyon’s big boney nose
A sharp, almost sweet smell began to rise from her open mouth.
-Donald Hall Without (trascribed from This American Life Episode #93)
This is a portion of a poignant poem by Donald Hall about the death of his wife to leukemia. While it's not AIDS, this poem really conveys the feelings of premature death.
And it makes me cry every time I hear it read by the author on TAL.
AIDS cuts millions of lives short. This quote from the beginning of the book And the Band Played On exemplifies the character of this virus:
And I looked, and behold a pale horse:
and his name that sat on him
was Death, and Hell followed with
him. And power was given unto
them over the fourth part of the
earth, to kill with sword, and with
hunger, and with death, and with
the beasts of the earth
-Revelation 6:8
Percentage of adult HIV prevalence per country at the end of 2005
To along with that tone, from T. S. Eliot
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T. S. Eliot The Hollow Men
As a soundtrack I listen to the Original Broadway Cast recording of Rent. What could be more powerful than the marriage of the two greatest forms of music ever created by man, rock and opera.
I'm Writing One Great Song Before I ...
One Song
Glory
One Song
Before I Go
Glory
One Song To Leave Behind
Find One Song
One Last Refrain
Glory
From The Pretty Boy Front Man
Who Wasted Opportunity
One Song
He Had The World At His Feet
Glory
In The Eyes Of A Young Girl
A Young Girl
Find Glory
Beyond The Cheap Colored Lights
One Song
Before The Sun Sets
Glory - On Another Empty Life
Time Flies - Time Dies
Glory - One Blaze Of Glory
One Blaze Of Glory - Glory
Find
Glory
in a song that rings true
truth like a blazing fire
an eternal flame
Find
One Song
A Song About Love
Glory
From The Soul Of A Young Man
A Young Man
Find
The One Song
Before The Virus Takes Hold
Glory
Like A Sunset
One Song
To Redeem This Empty Life
Time Flies
And Then - No Need To Endure Anymore
Time Dies
Here is some anti-AIDS advertising, which I found particularly interesting
February 13, 2008
Crampin' My Style
February 7, 2008
Lake Energy
The city I am rooted to is Minneapolis, my home for 18 years now. I don’t want to write generalizations about buildings and people for this blog, I feel that the land has much more power than buildings and people could ever possess. Cities are so manufactured, so manmade that it is easy to forget about the power the land has over them. In Minneapolis, the power the land has is subtle. There are no crashing oceans, or towering mountains. But the land here is strong; Minnesota is home to 11,842 lakes and the second oldest rocks on Earth. This city’s energy comes from its stone and water.
The most prominent geological features of this city are its LAKES. What power do they have? They do not cycle like the sea or flow like the river. They seem quiet and calm. That perception of quietness is the wooliness of the lake, not the essence. The water in lakes is flowing and cycling, and this flow has the power of both life and death.
Lake turnover.
| Water has a curious property. Unlike other compounds, solid water is less dense than its liquid form. Ice can float on water. In addition, cold liquid water is denser than warm liquid water. This property of water makes it one of two known compounds in the universe capable of supporting LIFE. Without water of Earth, there would be no life at all. The lakes can show us why: These phenomenon create the lake turnover effect. |  |
People are drawn to the lakes. In good weather the lakes are the busiest places in the city. People, too, flow around them and in them.
Lakes can hold the power of death as well. Regular lake turnover only happens in places that have cold winters. In 1986 Lake Nyos of Cameroon killed 1700 people. This lake lies above a volcanic fault. The magma leaks CO2 into the lowest waters of the lake. There is no turnover because the climate is so warm, so the gas saturates the water. The lake stayed like this for years, slowly building up gas, until finally on August 21 a landslide triggered a massive turnover releasing a huge cloud of CO2 into the lake basin, the cloud of gas spilled into a nearby valley displacing all the other gasses. It suffocated all life along the valley for 20km.
