196. Days of ozone

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Today was our second straight hot day. After only having a couple single days where the temperature reached into the 80s F, it has now blasted past the 90s into the 100s. Yesterday it was 106 -- the highest recorded temperature in the city's history, and today it was 102. I would have guessed it was in the 90s. 

The air quality is bad enough that I finally opened a bottle of artificial tears I've been holding on to for a couple months. The heat is supposed to break tomorrow.

The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander

p94 What a joyous memoir. The book is sad but also such a delight to read. The author, a poet, includes a poem by another poet about the death of her husband, in the voice of the dying husband, which closes with these lines,

...and I saw with the most amazing
clarity
so that I had not eyes but
sight,
and, rising and turning,
through my skin,
there was all around not the
shapes of things
but oh, at last, the things
themselves.

From "the death of fred clifton" by Lucille Clifton

Since I don't read German I can't tell how close Kant may have gotten to expressing this in such lovely and evocative language. But I would be very surprised. Perhaps poets should be assigned to philosophers the way the blind get guide dogs. 

Alexander elaborates about the poem,

...as Fred Clifton moves closer to true knowing, as he sees with "the most amazing/clarity." Death itself is like a snake shedding its skin. Fred Clifton describes "rising and turning/through [his] skin." A new self reveals itself when the old carapace has shed and died, as though we live in exoskeletons with something truer underneath.

Death comes with a gift in the poem; our loved ones tell us here that what we see with our eyes is different from what we know: "The things/themselves." "Oh, at last" is the moment of exaltation in the poem. Lamentation and exaltation are simultaneous here.

This is my 50% expectation that death is like waking up.

Postscript to South of the Slot

All the metrics for success are now middle class ones. If you aren't doing well enough in terms of income and home ownership to meet that standard you are defined as a failure. 

The urban renewal movement following WW2 (personified by Robert Moses in NY and Justin Herman here) set out to eliminate all pockets of non-middle class culture. Here, in the Western Addition, this took on a racial appearance as the neighborhood had become black during the war, after the Japanese were interned. But South of the Slot, the distinction was not racial but class. And the gentrification of that area is now being followed by the gentrification of the few remaining lower class neighborhoods on the southeast side of town, under cover of improving the housing stock and transportation options.

From what little I've read, this class extermination was even more obvious in the UK. "Progress" was defined so that it naturally required the elimination of an entire way of life.

Swimming In Creepy Waters

Another book title. (Suggested by K.)
I have no idea what this would be, perhaps the story of someone working in government during the Trump administration? Or the inside story of the Summer Olympics in Rio? 

Next time, "Semiotics for Dummies." (Also suggested by K.)