Visions of Sugar Plums Deployed...
This from Otto Mymein, assistant professor at the Military University School of
Germany in the late 19th Century. His speech made quite a splash one afternoon. Then lunch was served, and everybody forgot about it. The action Otto envisioned wouldnt come to pass in his lifetime. Posting with envy…
Dear members-
I was trying to sleep just last night but the puzzle of our inevitable battle filled my head with such fervor that I was forced to return to the kitchen, where with pen and paper scratching among sleeping men I drafted what must be the future of our conflict. Please, gentlemen, don’t ask me how the details came so clearly to my mind. It can only be that my time-enriched thinking has built from knowledge a berth for our counterpart inside my mind, allowing me a dialogic state. Indeed, my students and colleagues, last night I spoke, and my speech received a reply in our adversary's voice.
Yet still, most of you, sitting on couches, tempted to equate reality to the clouds of smoke above your heads, might want to see ourselves and our counterparts as confronting eachother face to face across a time stretching without horizon. To this I reply, hogwash, all will be decided by Christmas day.
The poet wears a laurel for a reason. He seeks to share, to say what's mine is ours and its all ours and… well, I am not quite sure what he says. But the truth apparent to men as they stare down their counterparts from across a divide is that there is one space, and one owner of it. The line will be drawn either here or there. One will be inside or out.
As for who will be termed the aggressor in this action, that is for history to determine. Why dilute your action with the instinct to name it? For when counterparts are as entangled as are we with ours, there is only reaction, no action, so that the move from which historians choose to remove the prefix, thus decalring an action, is their choice, and most certainly a different choice will be made in different halls. In this moment, think not of the christian melancholy that so often enters our men of letters and their tendancy to look within to find a share of all blame. Cheeks can be turned until death, but death will still be horrible upon arrival.
Thus, in this moment, when we have peace, our leaders talk to eachother in the language of cats, they mew their co-pleasure. But beneath their purring are extra-sonic murmurings that send up the hair on backs. We gentleman, as we stand at attention, are these hairs. It is we sounding the alarm, we who know that attack is inevitable. And I, from my vision of last night, know, that the men who will be sent forth into our counterpart on that day today wiggle in rooms warmer than the air outside yet slightly cooler than our bodies. They incubate, yet their lives are already in doubt. I saw this. It would not let me sleep. For on Christmas day our two nations will meet in the house of our nation, and if this is not done on our terms, I shutter and convulse in ulceric contractions to think what ill be the state of that day.
Germany in the late 19th Century. His speech made quite a splash one afternoon. Then lunch was served, and everybody forgot about it. The action Otto envisioned wouldnt come to pass in his lifetime. Posting with envy…
Dear members-
I was trying to sleep just last night but the puzzle of our inevitable battle filled my head with such fervor that I was forced to return to the kitchen, where with pen and paper scratching among sleeping men I drafted what must be the future of our conflict. Please, gentlemen, don’t ask me how the details came so clearly to my mind. It can only be that my time-enriched thinking has built from knowledge a berth for our counterpart inside my mind, allowing me a dialogic state. Indeed, my students and colleagues, last night I spoke, and my speech received a reply in our adversary's voice.
Yet still, most of you, sitting on couches, tempted to equate reality to the clouds of smoke above your heads, might want to see ourselves and our counterparts as confronting eachother face to face across a time stretching without horizon. To this I reply, hogwash, all will be decided by Christmas day.
The poet wears a laurel for a reason. He seeks to share, to say what's mine is ours and its all ours and… well, I am not quite sure what he says. But the truth apparent to men as they stare down their counterparts from across a divide is that there is one space, and one owner of it. The line will be drawn either here or there. One will be inside or out.
As for who will be termed the aggressor in this action, that is for history to determine. Why dilute your action with the instinct to name it? For when counterparts are as entangled as are we with ours, there is only reaction, no action, so that the move from which historians choose to remove the prefix, thus decalring an action, is their choice, and most certainly a different choice will be made in different halls. In this moment, think not of the christian melancholy that so often enters our men of letters and their tendancy to look within to find a share of all blame. Cheeks can be turned until death, but death will still be horrible upon arrival.
Thus, in this moment, when we have peace, our leaders talk to eachother in the language of cats, they mew their co-pleasure. But beneath their purring are extra-sonic murmurings that send up the hair on backs. We gentleman, as we stand at attention, are these hairs. It is we sounding the alarm, we who know that attack is inevitable. And I, from my vision of last night, know, that the men who will be sent forth into our counterpart on that day today wiggle in rooms warmer than the air outside yet slightly cooler than our bodies. They incubate, yet their lives are already in doubt. I saw this. It would not let me sleep. For on Christmas day our two nations will meet in the house of our nation, and if this is not done on our terms, I shutter and convulse in ulceric contractions to think what ill be the state of that day.
posted by M.N.V.L. Local 1430 at 12:04 AM
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