To Praise Appurtenances

short version

Our random bits may learn their only hope

of going on is to effect complex complicity.

The myth they do not labor under is Simplicity.

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long version

Pinocchio and Cyrano de Bergerac attempt to teach

the nose’s uses in a moral fable, one supposes. One,

you don’t lose worth if you’ve a long one. Two, your worth

diminishes as it grows long. Hard to grasp from that what’s

right and wrong. But I shall raise the cry: it’s not impertinent

to praise appurtenances which proceed from what we are, 

whatever they and that may be. Indeed, the psychic aids

we breed to feed our sense of pleasure and inspire

the wherewithal to measure, treasure and enact it can be just

as complicated and protracted as they need to be without

becoming an occasion for alarm. They may or may not cause

horrific consequences we can see, but their complex anatomy

won’t necessarily cause harm, indeed may conjure up

what charms. William James described his brother Henry’s

“encrustations” – how Henry spoke and dressed and lived –

as equivalent to barnacles and sea growths which throughout

the years accrued to him, amassing to create the ornate

flask of his appearance and his manner – so they’d be up

to the considerable task of storing and then pouring

who he was into appropriate receptacles. That this made him

something of a spectacle, and not one everybody liked

(though I’d have loved it), didn’t matter. It would seem our

beings don’t like splatter, unless their mission is to make

a mess. But most of us must coalesce. We’re each a sort of

oddly dressed and stuffed and basted turkey we re-grease

and we re-heat to offer on a platter to display the whole array

of us: our most, our least. Some will choke on it, some feast.

Our random bits may learn their only hope

of going on is to effect complex complicity.

The myth they do not labor under is Simplicity.

.