[lit-ideas] Sunday Something
- From: David Ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2015 20:21:08 -0700
Catkins fallen from willows, the barberry's leaves, flying ants that suddenly
appeared in great volume, none of these is edible. The crocosmia are another
matter; as soon as shoots push up, they get pecked.
"Nice fresh salad," Pecorino opined.
"What happened to your taste for weeds? I used to feed you weeds. I remember
you'd inhale them."
"Youthful indiscretion," said Appenzeller.
"I bet," Cheddar offered, "there are things from your youth you regret. Or
don't immortals have youths?"
"Mine was very far from here, across the ocean, in a land where they eat
lollies."
Mimo said she liked the sound of "lolly."
"It was another word for money," I explained.
"You ate money?"
"No, no. But the Japanese eat gold sometimes. So I'm told."
They agreed that swallowing gold is a reasonable thing to do if, and only if,
that gold can be directed away from the pooh system and into the egg-making
bits. I asked how this was managed.
"Incantations," said Cheddar, as if revealing some big thing.
"What do you chant?"
"Sonnets."
"Sonnets?!"
Appenzeller, "I believe that's what they're called."
"Where do you learn sonnets?"
Mimo, "From the crows."
Rocky, "Very smart birds, crows.
Cheddar, "One of them is called Shakespeare."
"Don't you mean that someone called Shakespeare an upstart crow?"
Cheddar, "I don't think so. That would be backwards."
Pecorino, "We're not stupid you know."
"Of course not. So would you like to give me a taste?"
Appenzeller, "We've nothing you'd eat, unless you like crocosmia?"
"I meant a taste of how one of your sonnets go."
Cheddar, "How can you taste something we chant?"
Mimo, "Do you often eat sounds?"
Pecorino, "That could be awkward."
Mimo, "We'd really have to watch out if the gods started gobbling our noise."
Cheddar, "Do gods gobble?"
Appenzeller, "That's turkeys you're thinking of."
Cheddar, "Turkeys aren't gods."
Rocky, "You can be sure of that."
Mimo, "Absolutely."
Cheddar, "It's from the Italian, you know, sonetto. Goes back to the Romans,
sonus for sound. A little sound is what we mean by sonnet. Like this." She
made a little sound.
"Nice one," I said. "You weren't referring to poetry, then?"
"What's that?"
Here's what I wrote in a slightly confused state after hearing a good many
academic conference papers this weekend:
When glaciers were close to their furthest reach and all was still well in the
world of the polar bear a group of men gathered on a farm outside France's most
famous gastronomic city. They were worried about the decline of the sausage.
"What," one of them asked, with appropriate hand gestures and gallic shrug, "is
to be done?"
It was meant rhetorically, there being wine held ready for when the
sausage-making was finished. Leave policy to the policy makers. But Jean-Paul
Sartre happened to be passing and popped his head round the door. "If you ask
me..." he began.
"We didn't," came the chorus.
He pressed on, "If you ask me...he who does nothing for the future of
sausage-making votes for the status quo."
"Sacre bleu!" said the butchers, as one. "We must call de Certeau." They
dialed. There was a pause; French telephones were famously slow.
"Allo?" said a voice on the other end, "de Certeau, Foucault and Gaze.
Hegemony speaking."
"We would like you to lobby," said the spokesman for the group. We wish to
'alt..."
"To what?"
"To 'alt...to stop...to arrest the decline of the sausage."
"Who is this?"
"We are the butchers of Lyon."
"Of Lyon? You are Klaus Barbie?"
"That is not funny."
At this moment the two Michels--Foucault and de Certeau--who had stepped away
from their desks for a mere two-hour long lunch, re-entered the office.
Catching the eye of Hegemony, their secretary, they raised inquisitive,
interrogatory brows. "Hein?"
Said she, "I have Klaus Barbie on the phone. He wants an arrest policy on
offal."
Everyone faces a moment in life, a fork in the road, when the choice is to go
this way or that. For the two Michels this was such a moment. Like dancers
following step instruction, they turned, waved farewell to Hegemony and headed
off to join the academy. In later years they reflected. Should they have
stayed and done something about the decline of the sausage? Would the world
have been better served if structuralism hadn't been invented and we had better
bangers, tube steaks, wurst?
We do not know. They took the linguistic turn and all of us, every human on
the planet, must now confront the truth that Orwell warned us about when he bit
into a frankfurter and discovered it was filled with fish. We have entered the
pan-sausage-gone; and the world turns.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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