Metro, Milano

Three steps down,
and you inhale a wash
of metro exhale,
a garrulous breeze blending
smells of dirt, steel, people,
and the past. As with all metros,
even the air commutes.

Turnstiles and silly small
gates need to know about your ticket,
which gets eaten then
barfed up by something chrome.
How strange
that all the metro workers have
left these caves.

Because you think in cities
that violence whispers to everyone,
you hang back from the track
at least six strides.

The train bullies a wind
in front of it.  The car doors
hiss like bothered cats. Outflow
of guarded faces comes before
inflow of anxious faces,
and don't dare take your time,
as if it belonged to you.

How quiet the riders are.
The train does all the talking--
a recorded voice from the 1960s,
lilting and aloof. A few furtive
glances disrupt the numbed
glumness. In the caves,

a few beggars and buskers
reshape not at all the flow of torsos
and heads on legs.  Branches
of the River Metro flow against
gravity up to level, where
oceans of noise are ludicrously
loud. Below, above, it's all
a goddamned semi-efficient mess.
Take your allusions

to Plato, Styx, and Persephone
and toss them like a ticket.
Nobody cares.
This is urban business. Surplus
value rides these trains
wherever these trains ride.


hans ostrom 2018

To Eddie Some Weeks After the Winter Solstice

Oceans are the ultimate artists, Edward,
more variously capable and constantly
original than earthquakes, rivers, ice,
and erosion. Of course, human art,

in contrast to all of these, is not
really in the conversation. Human art
is always a bit of a knock-off.
Sculpture, painting, surrealism,
realism, epic tales, Dada, absurdism,
comedy, tragedy, scrambled genres,
modes, and impulses, and forms
we cannot even grasp abound

in oceans, by oceans. The oceanic
opus is constantly changing,
ever-expanding, and utterly
unconcerned about audience,
remuneration, and critical success.

Sad Plato, when he was thought-seeking
for ideal forms, should have recalled
the ideal generator of forms:
the sea! The Greek seas alone
would have cheerfully overwhelmed
Plato's wee dialogues and allegories
and turned them into fantastic
shapes to nourish starved imaginations.

What do you think about that, Eddie
of La Jolla? I know how you like your
Plato and his greatest invention Socrates,
who, like a professional wrestling
star, always won his contests.

As you warm up your pipes to sing
in response to me, Eddie, let me stand you
to a salty tequila cocktail, an
ocean unto itself, some say.

hans ostrom 2016

Note to Hart Crane

"For unless poetry can absorb the machine...then poetry has failed of its full contemporary function."

--Hart Crane



As I started typing this wad of words, sir,
I received a note from "my" machine:
Your html cannot be accepted.

Afraid or not, I am
sure the machine has absorbed us.
Ever adaptable (I type this
as if I mean it), we write
from and about the technological
innards, but we be the absorbee.

Rather than building bridges,
the culture seems merely
to have outsmarted itself
in ways even a good advertising
man like yourself couldn't
have seen coming. It produces
catastrophe in a businesslike manner,
very professional.

Atlantis is a casino
and a resort, Plato
was a fascist, and the Brooklyn Bridge is
quaint, and . . . .

. . .And everything, is the problem.
Anyway, from inside, unlyrically,
some craft reports like this
about the lovely contours of the machine,
the words floating like plastic trash
on the surface of "our" seminal html. May
a brother buy a vowel? Machine says no.

hans ostrom 2015

"No Greatest Country"

Nobody lives in "the greatest country in the world,"
which is a phrase, not a nation.
Nobody and Plato's hologram.

Wouldn't a good nation cherish its skeptics,
partly because politicians and other
propagandists don't?

No one's more patriotic than a dictator:
fallacious reasoning, sure, but
nonetheless worthy of a cautionary pause.

Often I listen to a voice in me
that recoils from appeals to patriotism
because they feel like extortion.


hans ostrom 2014

"No Platonic Love," by William Cartwright

All Are All Alone

All are all alone
in the cave of the cranium.

Data and, via language, guests
may enter. Only the one

lives there though, bent over
a fire, cool-napping or

listening to underground streams
and echoes of screams.




hans ostrom 2013

Perfect Is Over-rated

(riff on language, Italicized,  found on Tumblr)


Perfect is Over-rated

I'm not perfect, and I don't want
to be. Because being perfect
is so over-rated.  I mean,
I'd actually rank imperfection
above perfection.  For one

thing, perfection doesn't exist.
Read that old fart, Plato.  You
can't get to Ideal from here,
so it's as bad as nothing.

Plus everybody I know
who's supposedly perfect
turns out to be, you know,
killers, rapists, head-cases,
cutters, pukers, yellers.
Dangerous or sad. 
Less than optimal, I'm thinking.

So, yeah, I wouldn't put
perfect on my fantasy team.


Hans Ostrom, 2012

Plato, Kant, Life

Plato, Kant, Life


There is no categorical
imperative or Platonic ideal.

These things do not exist.
They are that. Life is this.

More imaginative than Kant
is God, who does not want,

who makes perfect sense,
who knows the original whence.

Plato imagined he knew
what to make of this stew,

life. His notions were less than ideal.
This stew is terribly real,

not approximation, God knows.
Out of mystery, not forms, creation flows.

We and life are history,
Whereas God is  mystery.

God is neither categorical nor ideal.
God is rather formlessly real.

Copyright 2011

Wilde Thoughts

I've retreated to "the library," three walls of books, one of which (books) I pulled down: The Importance of Being A Wit: The Insults of Oscar Wilde, edited by Maria Leach and published in Oxford in 1997.

From p. 54 and, originally, The American Invasion:

"The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere, their 'Hub' as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustle and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry."

Take that, America! Although Wilde claimed the cities of America are inexpressibly tedious, he seems to have expressed the tediousness well enough. I think there's still a sense in which Americans learn sadly, or think they should learn sadly, especially at colleges that position themselves as "traditional" in one sense or another. Of course, there are some colleges where learning seems to be taken not at all, so I guess things could be worse. . . . I do imagine that Wilde might have a better time in Chicago nowadays. It must have been a pretty rough "town" back then, certainly not up to his refined expectations. (Ironically, the great iconoclast comes across as a bit of a snob in this quotation.)

From p. 150 and, originally, The Critic As Artist: "Ah! It is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself." That's a wise one.

From p. 48 and, originally, A Woman of No Importance: "The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years." Still true, yes? Americans, the eternal teenagers.

From p. 49 and, originally, An Ideal Husband: "If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilised." I think he meant the English need to be more interesting and the Irish less self-consumed, but I'm not sure. Of course, almost all Americans still equate "talking well" (whatever that may mean) with the English and "the gift of gab" (whatever tha may mean) with the Irish. So from this side of the Atlantic, it's call good, Oscar.

And from 106, originally The Decay of Lying: "Lying and poetry are arts--arts, as Plato saw, not unconnected with each other--and they require the most careful study, the most disinterested devotion." Indeed, poets and fiction-writers sometimes forget to "lie," to change "what really happened. " Poetry isn't journalism--or autobiography, although Wordsworth really tried to make it the latter, when he wasn't trying to make it philosophy. Both philosophers and poets like to play with words, however. I think that's why Plato was so suspicious of poetry and why the early Wittgenstein was so suspicious of philosophy, why he tried to reduce it to wordless math. Auden, a most philosophical poet (at times), liked "to play with words," his chief definition of poetry.

No-transition-alert!

Wasn't Stephen Fry superb in the "biopic" about Oscar Wilde? Great casting, but also a great performance. We've been watching him and Hugh Laurie (who is now "House") in the old Jeeves and Wooster BBC show. "Just as you say, sir."

[No-conclusion-alert]

Wrist

What a great old, ornery word "wrist" is. When I say it and think about it, as language, I see it walking out of an Anglo-Saxon forest, in a bad mood. According to the OED online, the word goes back at least to 940 A.C.E. in written (Old) English, and back then it meant the same thing it does today. Later, however, some people got sloppy for a while and used the word to refer to the ankle and to thigh- and calf-bones. That doesn't seem to have lasted long. "Wrist" can also be used a verb--in the game of cricket, for example. I think I've heard it used in tennis, too--"wristing" the ball over the net, as opposed to taking a full swing.

Where does the wrist begin and end? Is that an anatomical question or a metaphysical one?

Here's a poem meditating on the wrist:

Wrist

1.

The road narrows as it approaches the river.
The bridge is brief as bridges are. Beyond it,
five separate routes materialize. Seeming
parallel at first, the routes diverge.

2.

When I looked at her brown wrist
that summer, I fell in what-I-thought-
was-love. I don’t blame myself
for having thought me into love.
Her wrist was better than ideal because
it existed. So did she. Aristotle always
held a better hand than Plato’s, so
to speak, for he knew real beat ideal
every time just because it showed up.
The rest of what I knew that summer
seemed useless. It was. I do hope
she kept the bracelet.

3.

His wrists were placed under arrest
and bound. They were booked, charged,
arraigned, tried, convicted, and sentenced.
Loyal to his wrists, he went
to prison with them.

4.

The other day a woman’s wrists asked her
why she’d worked so hard. She said because
she wasn’t born a Rockefeller, for example.
The wrists said, “That’s what we thought.”
With the help of her wrists, she picked up
a tool and went back to work.

5.

By means of repetitive motion,
Industrial Society declared war on The Wrist.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom