08.14.03 - 4:36 p.m.

Room, Ottoman

Do you suppose the great kings of Ur would care
their legacy lives on the lips of men, if only a prefix
for the pretentious - ur-this, ur-that - or do you guess
the Ming Dynasty is ennobled by these eponymous
take-out boxes and chopsticks littering the furniture,
TV alert to the pious Mayan custom of burying relatives
beneath the dwelling floor, a fact we find more than a little
disturbing, practiced today by society's least desirables.
Reconcile that. Reconcile that to the next image up,
goosestepping troops - �ber-this, �ber-that - fragments
of empires loose in the lounge of language, our to-die-for
living room, fake persian rug, dusty venetians, the feudal
(nearly futile) displays, or how we've made a crude table
of what we know not long ago was fit for feet alone.

Hmmm. Adored this poem on first reading, but was more ambivalent on secondary reading. I love the casual, perfect rhythm and the alliteration on first reading, but on second reading it seems more awkward. Still, I'm still in love with it for the succession of then-now juxtapositions, of which I never tire, much like the endless (or, for me, all too rare) articles and features about how the French say what a cow says, and how the Koreans imitate the sound a cow makes. Hee. I love that stuff. I want a see 'n say from every culture. "The cow says..."

Which reminds me, of course, of the Sit'n'Spin. And Lightbright. Man, I always wanted a Lightbright. I thought they were about the coolest things in the world. And I also knew, somehow, (who knows? maybe I was wrong.) that there was not a chance in hell that I was gonna get one. I think my mother disapproved of them, just as she disapproved of the mini Betty Crocker ovens that cooked mini-cakes by the heat of a lightbulb. I totally wanted one of those, but she was DEFINITELY opposed to them. I'm not sure why. Was it a feminist thing? Did she not like the lightbulb? Did she think I was going to start a fire? Did she think I was going to make a mess?

Damn. I might have to go buy myself one of those. Heh. I would love to have one of those little cakes right now. I think I remember a Holly Hobby mini-lightbulb-oven as the particular object of my lust.

I lusted after Moo-Moo the Milking Cow, which, much like the name, was... er, a plastic cow, with udders. You (or, perhaps at this age - I was 3-4 - your parent) put milk in Moo-Moo, and then the kids could milk Moo-Moo. And drink the milk.

Oh, damn. This is exactly what I love about the internet: Milky the Marvelous Milking Cow. Obviously, as with many things my memory of the cow's name was not quite spot-on. Moreover, it appears that Milky the Marvelous Milking cow did not produce actual milk, which I thought it would, but rather milky-looking water. Yum. I am so retro-actively disappointed. I feel the same way I did when I actually got Quick Jump It's a Skunk for Christmas and had it break in the middle of the first game. I have never in my life completed a game of Quick Jump It's a Skunk, and now I never will.

I suppose, though, I should be happy that I can still long for Milky with a four-year-old's passion, untainted by the clear disappointment I would have experienced had I actually received Milky as a gift and found that drinking Milky's milk was sort of like drinking whey, except not so tasty.

What does Room, Ottoman have in common with Milky? Er, damn. Nothing. But anyway: I loved "fragments of empires" and the whole connect/disconnect feeling that is woven into the fabric of the piece in the deliberate juxtaposition of images. Also, fragments of empires. Le sigh. What more could you want?

I have both a clear-eyed and a romantic view of history, and I am perfectly capable of sort-of reconciling both. One is fantasy, the other is the wheel-turning process of something or other. Of course, it's not that hard to capture a little place in my heart. For example, now I'm all: Krushchev! I know that guy! after finishing the truly outstanding new Krushchev biography I read this spring. He ignored the famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s. He ignored and in some cases participated in the purges, he flattered his mad-man boss, wheedled and groveled and lied to himself and the nation but was also sort of the anti-Stalin, or the first hint of something other than Stalinism - the first suggestion of openness, whatever - but blah. I have a wee little crush on Nikita Sergeivich. Scary, no?

I also have a crush on the great kings of Ur and any fragmented empire, baking beneath a tropical or subtropical sun. I prefer my fragmented empires to be either dusty and dry as a bone, hidden in the middle of an impenetrable desert, the fractured buildings like the skeletons of long-lost beasts, beached, massive, amidst the shifting dunes, bleached by the sun, often obscured by the workings of sun and sand and wind, protecting a hidden little oasis somewhere, so that the faint splash of water from a hidden fountain is just music enough in the dead of night that one can imagine what it was when they lived here, the sloe-eyed queens carved bare into harsh white stone, worn almost to nothing, dreaming their ashen dreams in a tongue long dead. The droplets of water turn the dust in the air to mud, and then - almost instantly, so dry is the air - evaporate back into the greedy atmosphere. You swallow, and hard, and breathe through the handkerchief in your hand, and even stale, metallic water has a sweetness unmatched by anything else on the planet when it sluices across your dry tongue, down your parched throat.

Hmm, sort of like the place Danaerys Stormborn finds for her people out in the desert in those George RR Martin novels. Say, how's he coming with that sequel? Nope. Still not freakin' done yet..

Anyhoo, the other appropriate place for the scattered, bleached ribs of a lost empire is obviously some decadent rainforest riotous with growth so furious and green that its rotten before it dies and air so humid that you swim through it, languidly, the few clothes you bother to put on already clinging to your skin. Buried under the overgrowth, stained by the lucious slow-seep-rot, with birds nesting where kings once reigned. I will be showing my age (and my once pretty bad taste) when I mention that one of my favorite imagined lush-rainforest-rotten-jungle-corrupt-civilization ideas is Nyssa, the snake-lady-land waaaay down in the south from David Eddings' Belgariad, whose fabulously named capital was Sthiss Tor Maggiori and whose evil serpent queen was Salmissra and who sat around practically nekkid having plenty of apparently drugged and kinky sleepy heat-sex. I was like. Twelve when I read that book. Also: women ruled. Snake women! I loved Nyssa.

(And finally: blah: empire, schmempire. I'm reading King Leopold's Ghost right now. These are things we need to know, but sometimes I hate history: it is relentless and conscienceless and inexorable and there is only so much of it one can bear sometimes. How much remembrance honors victims, and how much exploits them? Why are some victims to much more worthy than others? I could ask less kind questions right now - (why the fuck are we so fucking ignorant of the world) - but the answers are too depressing, too heartbreaking to contemplate while reading about how a supposedly benevolent European monarch exploited and enslaved a country 20 times the size of his own that was, not long before, a kingdom in its own right. Moreover, it is harder to do that when one realizes how colonialism leads to tribalism (a rational response to the competition for limited spoils, limited resources, when so many resources are being removed from a country) leads to the vast swamp of complicated ethnic conflicts, massacres, violence in which a fair portion of the continent is sunk, while we stand on and watch from two troop ships off the coast, feeling - somewhere deep in the pit of our stomachs - superior to these savages who senselessly inflict this sort of violence on each other. So: that is the anti-empire tirade. I believe it all, with a passion that I have to swallow to keep from crying and grit my teeth to keep from screaming, but I would still rather think about Milky the Marvelous Milking Cow.)