Now that the Academy Awards are finally over, and the suspense of who will get the Oscar decided, the world can move on to other, weightier issues. In this vein, I give you the following from my favorite poet:

how history works

they raged against it,

that steel abomination,

that industrial phallus upthrust,

poised to rape the Parisian sky.

it was the artists and writers

who denounced it,

the aesthetes who wanted it pulled down.

and almost,

it was.

after the World’s Fair,

no longer needed

to celebrate the power of the Revolution,

the tower was promised to the scrap yard.

then someone said,

“well, we could put a radio antenna up there.”

p ferenczi

Doctor’s Amnesia

It can’t be rare these days. After the wars,

Watching Discovery Channel safe at home,

I saw a back I knew from angled mirrors:

Those pinched, frenetic features were my own.

And then the blow of memory’s return:

Unbearable burns, charred from the waist down,

Scrubbing so fast my fingers seemed to blur,

the flesh, the cries, immediate yet far,

were all as you saw them on TV.

I saw the things Prime Time would never see

caught by the cameraman beside the bed.

The child was just the age of my own son.

Frederick Foote

SILENCE

We live in an increasingly noisy society. The blaring of radios and televisions, the inescapable elevator “musak,” the cacophony of cell phones, beepers, alarms all intrude on our consciousness. Those of the baby boomer generation, with their rock shattered hearing deficits, are matched by the ever amplified music of younger generations, resulting in daily discourse carried on at jet take-off decibels. We have become more sensitized to air and smoke pollution, but have done little to decrease noise pollution in our lives.

Silence is a form of communication – one of the most mysterious of the human condition. Sometimes sought after though often not, it can be fearsome, occasionally awesome. But silence is necessary: without the silence between the notes there is no music, without the pause between the movements there is no dance. More than just the muffling or absence of noise, silence can be too mysterious even for the poet to express, as in Orhan Pamuk’s “Silence of Snow.” Herman Melville called silence “the voice of God,” “the consecration of the universe.”

In the end, silence has less to do with noise or its absence than with stillness. There exists a certain stillness of the soul – even in the midst of noise – that allows the listener to hear beyond the spinning of the universe, beyond the chattering of atoms, beyond even the silence of death; it is a stillness that allows one to hear with the heart, the heart of sound itself.

Yitzhak and Moshe were eating in a Chinese restaurant in London. 

"Yitzhak," asked Moshe, "Are there any Jews in China?" 

"I don't know," Yitzhak replied. "Why don't you ask the waiter? I'd be

surprised if there were no Jews in China. Our people are scattered

everywhere." 

When the waiter came by, Moshe asked, "Are there any Chinese Jews?" 

"I don't know sir, let me ask," the waiter replied, and went back to the

kitchen. 

The waiter returned a few minutes later and said, "No, sir. No Chinese

Jews." 

"Are you sure?" Moshe asked. 

"I ask everyone," the waiter replied. "We have orange Jews, prune Jews,

tomato Jews and grape Jews, but no one ever hear of Chinese Jews!"