RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, pt. 359 (avenel's TKO) Sometimes I just run down : the last item before fisticuffs is a TKO, and I'm finished without ever hitting the mat. (Yep, that was about as clear as a bell, sure was). One of the words my mother always used was 'sparingly.' I never knew where she got it from; it certainly wasn't characteristic of her  -  voice or language. She'd be ironing (spray irons were big then) and she'd use the mist to spray the thing she was ironing, but only 'sparingly.' Or she'd butter toast or something, but only 'sparingly.' (She had a penchant too -  also always interesting to me  -  for never actually 'completing' a task, but getting the idea across and then thinking of it as done. Like the butter on the toast  -  just a dumb little butter-blob, in the middle of the toast, and to her mind it was buttered  -  'sparingly,' but buttered. It was never ladled

RUDIMENTS, pt. 358 (avenel trailings again) One thing I always liked was the way Art fell apart. As I progressed along it, it fell apart, as idea : pretty simple stuff, even when repeated twice. I learned once that, before Cezanne, when you looked at a landscape painting there had always been a place where the 'viewer' could walk into the painting. There was an entrance, you could go there, as if 'entering' the park. He was the first painter to actually block that, cut the entrance out, by virtue of having abstracted the context. It was, I'd been told, as if 'you could no longer walk in them, they could only be entered by leaping.' That was pretty cool. What a concept of dynamism and strength, and, I also felt, it went for a million other things. Things like words, and opinions, and attitudes. Doing something like that is really a keynote function, or a keystone idea, whichever you'd rather say. (I

RUDIMENTS, pt. 357 (plato in Avenel, pt.2) One thing I learned in Philosophy class, oddly enough, was that if you are holding the bomb, you might as well throw it. It's at that one intersection of time and moment, never to be recreated, that you hold any real, personal power. And it's one of the strangest concepts ever. As if to say, a lit fuse should never just be appreciated by gazing; for it will go off. Some things possess their own meanings and powers. That's how wild revolutionaries throughout time  -  right to the present  -  have always done things. Yes, we still get startled, or feign being startled anyway. I've held so many metaphorical 'bombs' in my life as to make it legion  -  everything I've thrown thrown has been right and pointed. But all metaphorical  -  for I cannot be bothered with the physics of animation. - And anyway, what is life, really, but a fine-point conjunction of var