Author: geoplotsadmin

“Death can happen at any age regardless of the order of birth. But aging happens in the order of birth.”

A quote from the dialogue of Lost, a Korean TV drama series  titled 인간실격 (“Lost”), starring Jeon Do-yeon and Ryu Jun-yeol. 

The romanization of the Korean title Ingansilgyeog (인간실격) means “No Longer Human” or “Disqualified as a Human Being.” It’s the title of a  famous novel.

📖 The Original Novel

· No Longer Human is the English title of the classic 1948 Japanese novel No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. The story follows a man who feels profoundly alienated and puts on a facade of cheerfulness to hide his deep disconnect from society.

🇰🇷 The Korean Drama (2021)

· In 2021, it was adapted into a Korean drama  titled 인간실격 (“Lost”), starring Jeon Do-yeon and Ryu Jun-yeol. The series explores similar themes of ordinary people feeling lost, depressed, and hopeless in their 40s and 20s.

No Longer Human

Shinjū

Half way through Lost (no longer human), eight out of 16 episodes. At this point, the hidden potential plot line has appeared. whether or not Geon and Jeong with commit shijinku together has been obvious since it was revealed in episode one that the common friend did so with someone I can’t tell who is yet but .. indeed, it’s the background to  to the titles, a background as vivid as  Leonardo Cohen’s Halleluyah. 

Lost (Korean TV Series, English Sub)

Lost (TV Series 2021) ⭐ 8.3 | Drama, Romance

Some Prefer Nettles

I thought I wrote, not a perfect but at least a good poem, one which began with a real moment of wakening, with a line not perfect but still worth scribbling down. 

I dreamed I wrote a perfect line.

Behind it lay an amorphous shifting shape of sound—like the phantom sounds which Mandelstam put to the beginning of a poem.

The next morning, actually May Day, there was more than a sonic shape. Actual words began to fill in. My job was to work with them.

I dreamed I wrote a perfect line.
I couldn’t tell
The form into which it fell
Emptied of words, only a shape
Triolet, pantoum, villanellea  

 Or this

I dreamed I wrote a perfect line.
Morning come, it was erased.
Emptied of words, but a shape
of sound, unknown…

Pantoum, triolet, villanelle…

     Finally, the next morning, it fell together. So I thought.

I dreamed I wrote a perfect line
Morning come, it was erased.
All that sleep time gone to waste.
Was it by hap or by design?

To be continued …

Although its name suggests an off-brand of adult sanitary napkin, a permie is a poem whose semantics are driven by the mechanics of permutation. I wrote my first one in 1977.

 A simple matter of constructing meanings from alternative phrases provided by the poem itself.

     Those who love change fear  —>  Those who fear love change.

The addition of an implied comma could make the readings more varied. Take  the fourth line:
      Those who love, fear change —> Those who love fear, change. 

A world of possibilities open up.

I was alerted to permies by a recent experience with a quatrain I composed early one morning. 

I dreamed I wrote a perfect line.
Morning come, it was erased.
Was it hap or by design
All  that sleep time gone to waste?

Just as light began to suffuse the room it dawned on me that the order of the sentences could change into:

Was it hap or by design,
All that sleep time gone to waste?
I dreamed a wrote a perfect line.
Morning come, it was erased.   

And that simple inversion of a couple of couplets was just one possible arrangement. According to the laws of possibilities, though not probabilities, 24 sets can be derived from any four discreet items. The opacity of language and the constraints of syntax keep the number of plausible permutations down from the total of possible combinations.

No doubt my discovery was due to my love for palindromes, in particular the works of Anthony Etherin (https://bsky.app/profile/anthonyetherin.bsky.social), as well as the Brazilian and other palindromistas around Liga  Ágil  (https://bsky.app/profile/ligaagil.bsky.social).

* For permie, see The Permie

 My first permie, an epithalamium of sorts, was composed in April, 1977 on the occasion of my first wedding:

Those who who …

love fear change
fear love change
change fear love
fear change love
change love fear
love change fear 

I thought of it as a concrete poem and had composed it while I was working on the first academic paper I published, From the Pictograph to the Metapoem: Realms of Concrete Poetic Reference in Brazilian Concrete Poetry.

For the ceremony, it was set to music by Philip Larson. Unfortunately the recording and the original manuscript have been lost.

I wrote a second more conventional epithalamium, Buds Longing to Be Leaves

The apples blossomed first. The old apricot’s
fruit we missed visiting inquisitive relatives.
The exuberant migratory bird
who passed through last week has left us
and this evening in the garden recalls
the surreptitious spring we shared
in a backwater province more home than here.
So fertile then, we eked through months
of bliss with fear. Nothing came of it but
my now looking from this knoll to the light
matted by the screen of our kitchen door.
So this is what we engendered seasons ago,
our bodies buds longing to be leaves.

Yet as the changes commas ring rung upon the first tryptich show love is a complicated matter (love, change fear –> love change, fear).

It was a short term-marriage, as much my own fault as that of my partner. Soon I began a series of divorce poems, including:

Golden Gates

Rainbows burgeoned over the old apricot
I was watering, showers of tiny red leaves
leaves feigning rejuvenation.  I fell
into some weird trance. Friends  shed
inveterate habits, hobbled along
with canes, comfortable in their flab.
All went fine until their glib repartee
struck home. I lost my bearings.
You were hurt. I took fix after fix
on shooting stars. There was no choice.
I unleashed the hose, let it writhe
across the soggy lawn. Hoisting
my sacroiliac up the tree. Chary of tart
fruit, I gazed with watering eyes
to the isthmus of ocean, aching for an out.

Reciprocity

Down the well I threw a stone. No splash returned.
Just the right slice of night was served up instead.

Twice now the moon’s beckoned through the fog.
I’m no fool: moonbeams can’t be harnassed up to woe.

Riders end up ridden, haulers hauled, just like
the bars we put up to keep out thieves, not

ourselves in. I married someone. I made her
unhappy. She learned to make me unhappy.

So Clouds We Keep Making

Earthlings we are, so clouds we keep making
last in the sky as long as the light,
thoughts tracing the same thoughts at flight
in the afterglow of an undertaking.

Say some man leaves his wife. Say she leaves.
Said man sees the sun set through winter smaze
though no orb sinks into distant waves,
it is the spin of the earth he perceives.

Despite quakes and slopes plants grow straight
on this planet. We walk about, change spheres,
gravity keeping up and down athwart

and mooring the sun as the solstice nears.
Are there decent grounds to celebrate
when bodies slip their bonds and fly apart?

 

I grew an amputation.