Magpie

The magpie came back to the courtyard & its deep chill the magpie was a jay was a jackdaw was a bird in Germany if not a German bird. Whither the Carolingians and their monks whose recipes called for cinnamon from the Far East? You say cinnamon, I say cassia, though we’ve never between us tasted the famously fragrant spice Cinnamomum zeylanicum, nor the aromatic bark qirfah which according to the eminent medical scholar Ibn Sulaymān more than a thousand years ago ‘smells something like saffron and something like waterlilies’. ‘India is too fixed in our minds, and China,’ but who are we? If 23andMe tells me I’m XYZ will I tell you? Will you believe me or 23andMe? Have you trademarked your haploid potential? I never felt so alive as when afraid or when terrified a bad alive and the good was some music some sex the good kind the good alive. More kind than kith than kin. One senses the return of Lacan undead in his autocratic cardinal’s cope. One senses the vibrations of the problem of the many converted to sociology and technocratic policy soon to be swept away by the coming community or no. I’m as surprised as you to be writing on politics. Who’s not. What’s not politics is not the social I sang to Hannah Arendt a little bird flying austerely in my mind’s cage.