Volume 6, Issue 4
POETRY
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Last night a dead man came to me
In striking polka, plaided paisley, Wild orange, violet daisies Vaulting windows, speaking nas’ly, grabbing hands, imploring gravely Off the sill and up the av’ry - - Till I balked: “why these whimsies? Can’t you see the wire’s flimsy, The robins wake, the wren’s sing grimly, The weavers stir, you restive ninny!” but he just laughed, dim and thinly “Can’t you see, you’re dead in chimneys!” [READ FULL WORK]
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CREATIVE NON-FICTION
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In English-speaking countries, the term of art for studying longevity is “life expectancy.” The German, Lebenserwartung, is roughly the same. However, in countries in which Romance languages are spoken, the interval between birth and death is more a matter of aspiration than anticipation. The French call it “Espérance de vie humaine,” the Italians “Speranza de vida,” and the Spanish “Esperanza de vida” – all signifying hope, not expectation, for life. Caught between espérance and expectancy, a stoic hopes for the best while expecting the worst.
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CREATIVE NON-FICTION
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Suppose I am right so far, and that the shared thought bubble representing a thought experiment is only a sketch of what happens when two thinking beings engage in this kind of physics. We have the cartoon of an idea, its contours only. (And it isn’t as if equations are not involved—this could be shown by drawing equations in thought bubbles—but we must remember that the equations we choose to represent physical phenomena depend on our underlying conceptual scheme, which comes back to pictures. (This, we can suppose, rules out the possibility of someone with aphantasia engaging in the physics of thought experiments, because we are exploring the space where visual—even fantastical—intuitions align.))
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ESSAY
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Those struggles are real, too—they’re in the flowers. The one I Love Lucy episode that figures throughout the entirety of Sorkin’s film, “Fred and Ethel Fight,” begins with Lucy setting the table for dinner. She’s putting a bouquet into a vase, trying to make the flowers stand up without toppling the vase over. After trimming the stems and fumbling with the arrangement, the flowers look to be in place—and then, they push up, making Lucy jump and the live audience chuckle. It’s a petaled memento mori of sorts: for Lucy, for Lucille, for Lucy and Desi’s marriage.
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FICTION
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Cornelius Radhopper, despite the exuberance of his name, is more of an earth-moving, soil-munching entity than a man, somebody who tunnels his way through life, blind to imagination and light, eating his way through the soil of life and feeding indiscriminately on whatever decaying particles that appear before him as his head moves blindly forward in the darkness. He has adapted to this existence very well, his uncomplex mind digging into the day with its pointy end before allowing it to flex and force apart the obstruction in his path and allowing the rest of him to fully enter the space created in order to simply start the process again - a relentless path that leads to nowhere in particular, just a dark unending journey that started at a time most would describe as infancy, but of which he has no memory.
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Customized illustrations for all published pieces provided by Evgenia Barsheva.