Wanting 101

Piero della Francesca, The Nativity (1470–75). National Gallery, London.

“You either have to be part of the solution or you’re going to be part of the problem.”

—Eldridge Cleaver

The world is a monad—think of it as an infinitely large atom. It is indivisible and cannot be split, or "solved."

But I want to be part of the solution!

As we've seen, there is no solution. But, as you say, every problem must have a solution—so, logically speaking, there's no problem!

I want to be part of the solution though.

Science tells us that space and time are illusions. But the world wants, therefore it exists. Yóu want, therefore you exist. Wanting can thus broadly be viewed as some kind of solution. Does that help?

No, really, I just want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem!

The field of volology, or "want-ology"—volo is Latin for "I want"—is making tremendous strides these days! We're learning more about wanting all the time! Maybe we'll have it figured out before the Singularity.

Epilogue

I wanted to write a poem

that you would understand.

For what good is it to me

if you can’t understand it?

                           But you gotta try hard—

William Carlos Williams, “January Morning,” XV

Postscript

I'll be no more wanting by the light of the moon—

Pack in provoking the Global Monsoon!

If the world's a great monad and there is no Solution

(Likely one cause of the French Revolution)

And the Problem moreover has taken a powder,

Henceforth I'll privilege champagne and chowder.

No muss, no fuss, no crap: Pétrus or Châteauneuf-du-Pape—

A Nebuchadnezzar!* Don't mind the gap.

*A twenty-bottle Moët & Chandon Nebuchadnezzar of Châteauneuf-du-Pape might set you back $1,600—but as my old Ayatollah Omar says, "I often wonder what the vintners buy / One half so precious as the Goods they sell" (Edward FitzGerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám [1859], st. 71; "the stuff they sell" in 4th ed. [1879], st. 95).

February 2024

Burned into Stone

Mosaic in Monreale Cathedral, Palermo, Sicily (ca. 1174)

Your tablets flounder

on your history, commandments slain,

your lustful prince absolved but not Cain,

nor Lot’s nameless wife, burned into stone.

—Ricardo Pau-Llosa, “Homer to Moses”

Sometimes just an epigraph may suffice

—Walter Benjamin planned a book consisting entirely of quotations.

He lived in Paris then, at 10, rue Dombasle (Montreuil).

He couldn't afford it today—the rent there's 30 € per square meter now.

He's dead anyway—the Nazis did him in.

Tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse,* they like to say.

It doesn’t do, I know, not to make nice, but it'll all go smash some day

—the whole sick carnival of complicit nations!

*"Everything passes, everything craps out, everything breaks."

Note: Epigraph from Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s superb new collection, Fleeing Actium (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2023), 72.

Blotted Lines

Ben Jonson, copy of original portrait by Abraham van Blijenberch (1617)

The players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that [ . . . ] he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand.”—Ben Jonson

Jonson's right! In As You Like It,

That Swan of Avon writes, e.g.,

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,

. . .

In springtime, the only pretty ring time,

When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding . . .

Tweety birds chiming on perches?

Junk from a clockwork rubbish pail,

Makes the actors' tipsy lurches

Pastoral . . . in this makeshift wail.

Accompagnato

Restrain if you can the double dutch

Synecdoche—that's much too much!

Do not strong-arm the shy refrain

—sad songs cast out do not obtain.

Write what you must to have your fill,

Author words that have free will,

Baggage, heirs, and can keep time.

Say no to every trite design!

What's wanted’s some terrific line,

The mot that only you set free

(like "igneous cliff" or "ironwood tree");

Conveniently, a smart-ass phrase

0n darkling days in obscure woods.

Her cockamamie bill of goods,

The muse presents—a tidy sum!

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon

(Milton, “The Blindness of Sampson").

But look on the bright side of doom,

Alligator!

I’ll see you later.

An earlier version of this poem appears in the February 2024 issue of the New English Review; www.newenglishreview.org/articles/blotted-lines.