Not Much

Abelia x grandiflora "Little Richard"

"I'm like a one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store."

—Jesse Stone, "Shake, Rattle and Roll" (1954)

"What are you going to do today?"

I ask Muggs when she comes to me this morning.

"Not much," she replies,

flexing her butterscotch paw, and sits there purring on the bed.

I put the words into her mouth, of course.

(She has no teeth and cannot bite.)

But not much is, indeed, what we plan to do.

Today is everything that is the world.

Nothing we might do can change that.

The Little Richard abelia at the door is in full bloom.

No bees though—

although in years gone by it was alive with them.

"The world is everything that befalls."*

" . . . and everything we know that is not just noisy bluster can be said in three words."†

*Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), 1: "Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist."

†Ibid., epigraph, from Ferdinand Kürnberger: ". . . und alles, was man weiss, nicht bloss rauschen und brausen gehört hat, lässt sich in drei Worten sagen."

June 17, 2024

Entropy

The poet Saʿdī (seated left) received by the ruler of Fars. Mughal India, 1602.

Sadi Carnot, named for the Persian poet Saʿdī of Shiraz,

discovered the Second Law of Thermodynamics

which Einstein thought the firmest thing in physics.

When his father was a Director of France,

Napoleon’s lover Joséphine babysat him. General Bonaparte, hastening home from war in Italy,

messaged ahead to her famously : “J’arrive, chérie ! Don’t wash!”

The motive power of an engine, Sadi later showed,

results from the transfer of energy from a warm body to a colder one.

(The dashing general might’ve told him that!)

Life's reverse entropy—unites what it disperses,

transferring, maybe, molecules from your warm body to mine.

Though in my longevity I lack the Corsican's élan—

hélas, I've passed the climacteric—and am no Persian poet,

I'd be happy a bit of warming to receive.

Permit me once again to quote Napoleon's splendid message: “J’arrive!”

Sadi Carnot in 1813, in the uniform of a student at the École Polytechnique

Sadi died of cholera in 1832, aged 36, in an asylum where he had been confined for "mania." Fearing infection, they buried his papers with him, which were thus lost. He got little credit for his discovery of what is called the Carnot cycle until Clausius restated it in 1850.

Note: The French expression “J’arrive!” means “I’m on my way! I’m coming!”

Ill Met by Gaslight

In imitation of C. P. Cavafy’s “The God Abandons Anthony” (1911)

When suddenly you hear

the clang of the psephological tocsin,

sounding too loud to be dismissed,

and choruses demanding your departure,

don’t bitch at Fortune

deserting you, your pissant works

and illusory projects.

Make America pay for dumping you—

grab the bitch down there, where it hurts!

Don’t say you were cheated,

or that it was all really just a dream.

Disdain such cheap cop-outs.

Sidle up boldly once more to the lectern

like one who has been expecting it.

You owe it to yourself, having gas-lit

this great country so mercilessly.

Puff-eyed, but not giving in to the  boohoos,

like lesser men, get a final kick out of your fucked-up destiny.

Tell them what you really think of them!

Screw America cutting you loose!