Army Ants

The Whirligig Beetles are wary and fast with an organ to detect the ripples.

The Arachnid Moths lay their eggs inside other insects along the borders of fields or roads in clusters of white cocoons.

The Ribbed Pine Borer is a longhorn beetle. Their antennas are half the length of their body and they feed on dead red pine.

Robber Flies, with their immobile heads, inject a paralyzing fluid into their prey that they snatch from life in mid-air.

The Snow Flea's mode of locomotion, strange and odd with a spiny tail mechanism with hooks and a protracted tube from the abdomen to enable moisture absorption.

The female Praying Mantis devours the male while they are mating. The male sometimes continues copulating even after the female has bitten off his head and part of his upper torso.

Every night, wasps bite into the stem of a plant, lock their mandibles into position, stretch out at right angles to the stem and, with legs dangling, they fall asleep.

If one places a minute amount of liquor on a scorpion it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death.

The Bombardier Beetle, when disturbed, defends itself by emitting a series of explosions, sometimes setting off four or five reports in succession. The noises sound like miniature popgun blasts and are accompanied by a cloud of reddish-coloured, vile-smelling fluid.

It is commonly known that ants keep slaves. Certain species, the so-called Sanguinary Ants in particular, will raid the nests of other ant tribes and kill the queen and then kidnap many of the workers. The workers are brought back to the captor's hive where they are coerced into performing menial tasks.

And as we discussed last semester, the Army Ants will leave nothing but your bones.

Perhaps you've encountered some of these insects in your communities, displaying both their predatory and defense characteristics, while imbedded within the walls of flesh and passing for what is most commonly recognized as human.

"Army Ants"
-Tom Waits

The Blind Woman's Song

All struggling for heaven is a struggling for joy
and the aim of every heart is paradise.
How baleful, then, if shady powers should lead
and gather those consumed with wrath and greed
into that struggle, darkening its advance
with flags of vengeance, hate, intolerance.

How hard for mankind to perceive the true
as a natural desire that can be realized.
How hard to know one’s way so early on.

How hard to stand there droning at the altar,
appealing to a god about whose laws
the only thing we know is that he suffers
from all that does not wholly serve his cause.

How hard to fit belief to daily living.

How hard to grasp a god of sacrifice.
How hard not to be thinking in our silence:
must still more sacrificial blood be let,
and why have executioners not vanished yet?

How hard not to be thinking in our silence.

And practices of grace, how hard to grasp
for one who’s never spoken with the dead
and never found an answer from those graves
to which no fairies steal with magic staves.

For from death’s bonds only one has come
to meet his god when all the others, dumb
and blind among the miseries of decay,
must lie there till all time has passed away.

How hard to keep one’s faith in life to come.

How right to have the wish for life to come.
It witnesses to a delight in living
and an urge to see its loveliness once more,
not simply die like dragonflies on shore.

How right to witness a delight in living.
How right to set one’s life above one’s death.
How hard the squirming in a grave-deep crevice.
How easy to believe in life to come.

Sunk in earth the generations lie
in stark-blind fields beneath the springtime wind
and as one choir they raise their voices high
in blind men’s anthems to the land of Rind.

With the limbs of their bodies ravaged into soil,
daily they celebrate their god gone blind
who knows all things and has no need to see
those shapes of life whose raiment he assigned.

The tender elements will rot away,
the solid elements are meant to hold.
But time does pass and soon there comes a day
when solid elements decay to mold.

And soon with ease their chorus is delivered
to the tops of trees, and every leaf is breathing
to any breeze that may be passing by
that death, lapped in summer, makes a joyful seething.

As selflessly as lovely summers do,
so the soul of life goes, as ungraspable
as lovely summers which have gone away
and every year come visiting anew.


from Aniara
Harry Martinson
1956

Tarot is b s

Tarot cards were created in the 1400s as playing cards. Their name comes from an Italian word taroch, for “fool” so, basically a Joker.

They remain playing cards everywhere in the world -- except for the English speaking world, the only place where they are used solely for fortune telling.

They were playing cards for 350+ years. Then in 1781 a French “occultist” i.e. con man named Antoine Court simply MADE UP the idea that tarot cards originated in Egypt and were used for fortune telling. In 1785 another con man named Jean-Baptiste Alliette popularized Tarot divination.

The terms "Major Arcana" and "Minor Arcana" were first used by Jean-Baptiste Pitois in the early 1800s.

The Tarot fortune telling fad was limited to France only, then died out in France. The English (typically) picked it up in the later 1800s, after everyone else had dropped it.

The 1960s counterculture revived and further popularized the myth of Tarot as fortune telling cards.

The actual games, still played around the world, are called Tarochi in Italy and Tarock in Germany. The spelling as “Tarot” was made up by the French.

Aniara

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniara

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniara_(film)

https://gsproject.edublogs.org/gs-texts/texts-used-in-2017/aniara-by-harry-martinson-3/

daily affirmations

https://attrition.org/misc/affirmation.html



On this day I will look at my past mistakes and project them onto the future.

Today I will create a crisis situation so I can feel really alive.

I have a right to be physically unattractive.

I will make spiritual bankruptcy my goal for the day.

I have a right to change people into who I want them to be.

Today I will belittle those around me as I've been belittled in the past.

Extreme mood swings are my goal for the day, as they are so invigorating.

I have a right to seek revenge on those who have hurt me, and so today I'll begin to intricately plot against them.

Today I will surround myself with unhealthy people so that I may feel superior to them.

Today I celebrate the fact that my underdeveloped sense of identity allows me to fit into a wide range of situations.

Today I will only do things for which I receive very clear approval or applause.

My choices are limited; therefore, I must rigidly stick to the plan I have outlined for myself.

Today I will start a project only so I can later abandon it because of my perfectionistic standards.

Today I will lie in bed and wallow in self-pity.

Today I will purposefully fuel someone's worst fears.

While in conversation today, I will practice keeping a mental inventory of other people's stupidity.

Today I will practice playing the victim with my friends and coworkers.

This year I will save money by not buying birthday cards for anyone; I will tell everyone their card must have been lost in the mail.

Today I will hoard something I was denied as a child.

the robin and the worm

the robin and the worm
by don marquis


a robin said to an angleworm
as he ate him
i am sorry but
a bird has to live somehow

the worm being slow witted
could not gather his dissent into a wise crack and retort
he was effectually swallowed before he could turn a phrase

by the time he had reflected long enough to say
but why must a bird live
he felt the beginnings of a gradual change invading him
some new and disintegrating influence was stealing along him
from his positive to his negative pole
and he did not have the mental stamina of a jonah
to resist the insidious process of assimilation
which comes like a thief in the night

demons and fishhooks he exclaimed
i am losing my personal identity as a worm
my individuality is melting away from me
odds craw i am becoming
part and parcel of this bloody robin

so help me i am thinking like a robin
and not like a worm any longer
yes yes i even find myself agreeing that a robin must live
i still do not understand with my mentality why a robin must live
and yet i swoon into a condition of belief
yes yes by heck that is my dogma
and i shout it
a robin must live

amen said a beetle
who had preceded him into the interior
that is the way i feel myself
is it not wonderful when one arrives at the place
where he can give up his ambitions
and resignedly nay even with gladness
recognize that it is a far far better thing
to be merged harmoniously in the cosmic all

and this comfortable situation in his midst
so affected the marauding robin
that he perched upon a blooming twig
and sang until the blossoms shook with ecstasy
he sang
i have a good digestion
and there is a god after all
which i was wicked enough to doubt yesterday
when it rained

breakfast breakfast
i am full of breakfast
and they are at breakfast in heaven
they breakfast in heaven
alls well with the world

so intent was this pious and murderous robin
on his own sweet song
that he did not notice
mehitabel the cat
sneaking toward him

she pounced just as he had extended his larynx
in a melodious burst of thanksgiving
and he went the way
of all flesh fish and good red herring

a ha purred mehitabel
licking the last feather from her whiskers
was not that a beautiful song he was singing
just before i took him to my bosom
they breakfast in heaven
alls well with the world
how true that is

and even yet his song echoes
in the haunted woodland of my midriff
peace and joy in the world and over all the provident skies
how beautiful is the universe
when something digestible meets with an eager digestion
how sweet the embrace
when atom rushes to the arms of waiting atom
and they dance together
skimming with fairy feet along a tide of gastric juices

oh feline cosmos you were made for cats
and in the spring
old cosmic thing
i dine and dance with you
i shall creep through yonder tall grass
to see if peradventure some silly fledgling thrushes
newly from the nest
be not floundering therein

i have a gusto this morning
i have a hunger
i have a yearning to hear from my stomach further music
in accord with the mystic chanting of the spheres
of the stars that sang together in the dawn of creation
prophesying food for me
i have a faith that providence has hidden for me
in yonder tall grass
still more ornithological delicatessen
oh gayly let me strangle what is gayly given

well well boss
there is something to be said for the lyric and imperial attitude
believe that everything is for you
until you discover that you are for it
sing your faith in what you get to eat
right up to the minute you are eaten

for you are going to be eaten

will the orchestra please strike up that old tutankhamen jazz
while i dance a few steps i learnt from an egyptian scarab
and some day i will narrate to you
the most merry light headed wheeze
that the skull of yorick put across
in answer to the melancholy of the dane
and also what the ghost of hamlets father replied to the skull
not forgetting the worm that wriggled across one of the picks
the grave diggers had left behind

for the worm listened and winked at horatio
while the skull and the ghost and prince talked
saying
there are more things twixt the vermiform appendix and nirvana
than are dreamt of in thy philosophy
horatio

fol de riddle fol de rol
must every parrot be a poll