"Why would anyone bother to read this? I'm probably obtuse and terminally outmoded in
my thinking. I myself will undoubtedly die unknown." FP
On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:24:43 -0500, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>The Mysterious Barricades
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>It’s a harpsichord piece
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>by Couperin, 1741. Two generations
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>(or, for peasants, three) before
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>the Revolution. The music hardly
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>seems to invoke defiance or defense,
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>except insofar as all art is
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>an obstruction, a damming
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>of the universal flow
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>of pain. A Jacquerie gathers,
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>piles fanciful junk. They have
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>long jaws, wide hat-brims,
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>the individuation
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>bestowed on clothes by lice and moths, on
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>bodies by starvation. They
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>caper. The flintlocks
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>of the King oppose
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>their pitchforks, the mitrailleuses
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>of the National Guard
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>their pikes. And always
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>the other side has mind-rays
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>that dull and numb. And always
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>cars traverse the ectoplasmic
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>barricades like sixteenth-notes
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>in tense Baroque phrases shaped
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>by stoplights. A poet
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>doffs his top hat
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>and crouches beside the people and fires
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>wildly. Has long cherished
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>hatred of every class, but joins in
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>when on rare occasions
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>History aspires to the condition of music.
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>Cheesy Sleazy
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>A Roman, reawakened, couldn’t stand us.
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>Men without family,
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>he would think, or honor. Men ruled by women,
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>even by children. The rich
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>no better than shopkeepers. Their things
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>are impressive, miles of glass, but their assumption
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>that I will be awed by them is
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>intolerable. Swarming masterless slaves, half
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>graeculi, half pudgy Germans,
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>and the rest from parts unknown and therefore
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>vulgar.
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> Jowly, hard-eyed,
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>he glances at me across tables
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>in the upscale place to which the scientists
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>have taken him, and suddenly
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>it’s me; it’s 40-something,
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>and I’m talking art in big light
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>between force-field walls with incredibly pleasant
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>sexy people. The long accommodation
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>to computers. The synthesis of sculpture and film.
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>New philosophical takes
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>on fiction while the colonies extended
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>closer to the Galactic center. Plus my
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>own work, and names I expected to hear,
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>and bursting health and bracing air,
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>till some wavering edges
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>suggest that none of us is here –
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>me gone entirely, their originals
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>heedless as cabbage-plants in potting soil.
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