Tuesday, August 29, 2017

9889. SYMBOLS OF THE FUTURE

SYMBOLS OF THE FUTURE
Just while the running river ran out
my tongue-tied status was cleared and
I sat at the bench. We were eating, I can
recall, Pennsylvania-Dutch pretzels that 
were pretty good though too hard on my
teeth. I laughed at my joke about that
Greek orator, Demosthenes, practicing
speech with pebbles in his mouth. I said
it felt like that, with the pretzels.
-
You muttered, with a mouthful, how the
Greeks knew all the tricks. I said my 
simple yes, and we moved along. You
know symbols  -  of the future, that is  -
are never recognized at the moment they
become so. It's only years later when,
looking back, one realizes how everything
since has been built around that instant.
-
The sunning game  -  try getting a tan
in the fog. You know? We 'activate' the
symbol  -  the whatever it is  -  pretzels,
here, on a bench, and the Greeks  -  and
then we activate again, from that point on,
the parts of the psyche that were, and are
now, connected to them. Yes.
-
Anyway, I remember I could hardly hear you;
with the river running like that over the rocks.
There was quite a gurgling racket at the spot.
Where we sat. It's odd : You'd figure water
to be a silent thing, but oh can it make noise.

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