Nobody's creekbed

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The Anterior Insula and Hwy W

Saturday, July 29, 2017

Weird! At 3:32 am this morning, President Donald J. Trump tweeted, then quickly deleted, the following:

"'Well, if you need it . . . I . . . ,' Mitya muttered, and having sat down on the bed, he began taking his socks off. He felt unbearably awkward: everyone else was dressed, and he was undressed, and—strangely—undressed, he himself seemed to feel guilty before them, and, above all, he was almost ready to agree that he had indeed suddenly become lower than all of them, and that they now had every right to despise him. 'If everyone is undressed, it's not shameful, but when only one is undressed and the others are all looking—it's a disgrace!' flashed again and again through his mind. 'It's like a dream, I've dreamed of being disgraced like this.' But to take his socks off was even painful for him: they were not very clean, nor were his underclothes, and now everyone could see it. And above all he did not like his own feet; all his life for some reason he had found both his big toes ugly, especially the right one with its crude, flat toenail, somehow curved under, and now they would all see it. This unbearable shame suddenly made him, deliberately now, even more rude. He tore his shirt off.
      'Would you like to look anywhere else, if you're not ashamed to?'"

Sunday, July 02, 2017

"In the deep darkness, the iron door of the prison suddenly opens, and the old Grand Inquisitor himself slowly enters carrying a lamp. He is alone, the door is immediately locked behind him. He stands in the entrance and for a long time, for a minute or two, gazes into his face. At last he quietly approaches, sets the lamp on the table, and says to him: 'Is it you? You?' But receiving no answer, he quickly adds: 'Do not answer, be silent. After all, what could you say? I know too well what you would say. And you have no right to add anything to what you already said once. Why, then, have you come to interfere with us? For you have come to interfere with us and you know it yourself. But do you know what will happen tomorrow? I do not know who you are, and I do not want to know: whether it is you, or only his likeness; but tomorrow I shall condemn you and burn you at the stake as the most evil of heretics, and the very people who today kissed your feet, tomorrow, at a nod from me, will rush to heap the coals up around your stake, do you know that? Yes, perhaps you do know it,'  he added, pondering deeply, never for a moment taking his eyes from his prisoner [...] 'You look at me meekly and do not deign even to be indignant with me. Know, then, that now, precisely now, these people are more certain than ever before that they are completely free, and at the same time they themselves have brought us their freedom and obediently laid it our feet. It is our doing, but is it what you wanted? This sort of freedom?'"

— from Ivan Karamazov's poem about Trump hosting Jesus


Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.