… a Rilkean meditation on bridges.

***********************************

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood’s dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions…For the god
wants to know himself in you.

**************************

This is by way of a pep talk, mes petites, having to do with nothing less than the imperative to forge a creative, meaningful life. When you were a child (see Intimations of Immortality) the sheer visceral energy of being young, that heedless life force, “carried you over” the darkness and peril of being. But that was kidstuff, and it only pertained to you, and it didn’t mean much beyond simple inarticulate strength and delight in earthly existence. Now it’s time to transcend the unproblematic egotism of youth and offer something to the world, and that will mean struggling with complex, problematic forces to perceive and build so-far “unimagined” connections.

To infuse the world with wonder, to reveal its hidden beauty, means overcoming the dark abyss that lies under all that we do. That abyss (‘Winding across wide water, without sound. / The day is like wide water, without sound‘) is not merely our own awaiting mortality, but also the soundless nothing the world is without our articulate speech, without our artistic/architectural hand upon the land. So this is the pep talk: You can do it. You can shape and fill the earth with meaning, articulate sound, human beauty. Your soul offers you, grants you, the capacity for this earth-brightening achievement; you must not be afraid to accept what it wants to grant.

For after all, it’s “not too hard” for you to work with the seemingly unbridgeable complications of the world, to take its welter of Things and bring them together in clarifying, enabling ways:

I loved you, so I drew these tides of
Men into my hands
And wrote my will across the
Sky and stars

Indeed, you cannot shirk this imperative, much as you would like to be “swept along” in the abyss. You must be adequate to the challenge of the world.

Use your powers, stretch them out, flex your creative muscles! Stand boldly above the abyss and bring the seemingly irreconcilable complications of a world of turmoil into alignment, so that where there was once nothing there is now something — something upon which your fellow human beings can locate and know ourselves and the world. For the god / Wants to know himself in you. Only through our interiority can the earth arise and know itself. Only our human powers of perception and feeling can intuit and express both the contradictions of existence and their overcoming.

… photograph… but also likes to shake his tush...

‘The vessel notified MD Department of Transportation (MDOT) that they had lost control of the vessel and an allision with the bridge was possible.’

Yup. An allision is an accident in which only one ship is moving.

[Professor Francis] Quek told the officer who visited with the witness, according to the arrest report, that he normally uses the [faculty] lounge to practice with his [fully loaded] handgun and that he had not had any problems in the past with people walking into the lounge.

Quek’s reward: Texas A&M has put him on paid leave, so … He shoots, he scores! No teaching, at full salary!

Another feather in soccer’s cap. We tend to focus on the brutality and bigotry of European stadiums, but let’s not forget the great fans closer to home!

To paraphrase Lady Macbeth.
American political rhetoric on the right is gushing blood.  Katie Britt’s excited smile when she described the country as “steeped in the blood of patriots” has weirded out lots of commentators, as has candidate Trump’s recent enthusiastic prediction, at a rally, that if he loses, “there’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”   
Trump is always going on about blood – not, like Britt, that of patriots, but of the streets.

Yet who would have thought the Grand Old Party had so much blood in it?  Republican red flows literally now; the MAGA GOP is the party of plasma, with vampirish Trump vamping about the crimson hellscape the USA already is, and certainly will be, should he fall short of victory.  
Politicians almost always invoke blood in the context of fallen patriots, although in MAGA world, as in the case of Britt, there’s often a heavy blood of the lamb overlay.  Britt and much of her Evangelical audience is used to singing lyrics like these every Sunday:

There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins.
And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.

Evangelical music directors draw on a … flood of this redeeming gore in their programming, and no one in church says boo about it.  
But Trump’s arterial oratory is something else again.  His audiences are perfectly prepared to hear God and country, and even Revelation/Armageddon, in his thundering; but some seem taken aback by the angry sense of meaninglessness coursing through his veins.  They’re not being washed in Trump’s bloodiness; they’re choking to death on it.  

***********************

In fact they are watching, in real time, as a lifelong nihilist reckons with old age and death, not to mention likely electoral defeat, and it ain’t pretty.  And it certainly ain’t religious.
Trump’s evangelicals long ago made their peace with his stark godlessness; he represents their flawed but elected transformer of the Supreme Court and other heathen elements.   What they hadn’t reckoned with is what people like Donald Trump – see Christopher Lasch’s book, The Culture of Narcissism – turn into toward the end.  
One of my acquaintances – a high-profile architect/artist – told me on his deathbed that he was convinced the world was coming to an end along with him.  He took bitter pleasure in the thought that if he had to endure the insult of death, at least all other living beings did too, in one big wipeout.  Trump’s delectation of the bloody death of America is exactly this cold comfort – if he has to go, he’s going to take everything down with him.  Death is for losers.
As is age and debility.  Already he paints himself, an aging coquette, like Thomas Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach in “Death in Venice”; already he insists his aphasic moments are intentional satire.  But no cover story, no makeup, can hide his predicament:  He is a human being like the rest of us, which means he gets the same tragic life we do.  Most of us grapple with that – philosophically, spiritually – in an effort to come to terms with it.  But people like Trump do not do this, and his audiences have the dubious privilege of observing his gaping existential wound as he is forced to glimpse the reality of the end of life.
At its best, nihilism produces Samuel Beckett.  It produces Charles Baudelaire (‘Nothing in nature now remains unblooded. / I used to hope that wine could bring me ease, /  Could lull asleep my deeply gnawing mind. / I was a fool: the senses clear with wine. / I looked to Love to cure my old disease. / Love led me to a thicket of IVs / Where bristling needles thirsted for each vein.’); it produces Sylvia Plath (‘The world is blood-hot and personal / Dawn says, with its blood-flush.’).  At its worst, in the current Republican presidential candidate, it brings to mind the earth-killing fantasies of Trump’s predecessor, the French reactionary Joseph De Maistre: “The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things … until the death of death.”

The closer you get, the worse Harvard’s Gino looks. This is from a Vox piece.

[W]hile there are many people who could have manipulated the data for any one of the studies, the only common denominator across all of them — over eight years — was Gino…

Between the dishonesty researchers who have one by one turned out to be dishonest and the cancer research that turned out to be reusing Photoshopped versions of the same test result pictures, the last few years have been full of discomfiting reminders that, yes, some [of the highest-profile] people will cheat to get ahead in science, and we lack a robust process for catching them.

Scientific integrity currently depends on the willingness of individuals to speak out when they see fraud, and it’s precisely that willingness Gino’s [defamation] lawsuit targets.

Background here.

… John Calipari, whose latest thing is losing lots of games at Kentucky but costing that stoooopid school over 33 million if it wants to get rid of him.

The 1929 Evening Journal (Wilmington Delaware) reports that UD’s grandfather, Joe, and Joe’s brother Nathan, had warrants sworn out against them by an angry dance hall owner, who considered it unfair that he had to close on Sundays, but Ocean City boardwalk amusements did not.

weather vane, dog, wheelbarrow, mr ud fixing a garden hose

For the second time, Scathing Online Schoolmarm has caught someone using exuberant when they mean exorbitant. The first one was

Rehoboth Beach is Delaware’s most overrated destination mainly due to the cost of parking and its exuberant enforcement of parking meters.  

I think the writer probably had excessive in mind along with exorbitant. Whatever.

And there’s this.

Ball told him that was “a felony,” but she wouldn’t report it. She just kept prescribing him exuberant amounts of oxycodone. 

[W]hen Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX) had his turn to speak, he presented a big map on an easel which identified Ukraine as Kazakhstan and vice-versa.

197,000 people, or 17.8 percent, voted for either Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis [in the Florida Republican primary], despite both candidates having dropped out of the race. The results suggest the former president is losing support in Florida compared with the previous election in 2020. 

… Trump’s VP list.

Francesca said Nina did the dirty and now all hell breaks loose.

Nina is a product of Atelier Ariely … so…