Another brief posting. And yes, I am not dead yet, and my second breakfast — sriracha-spicy soy-salty Singapore-style rice noodles (which has shrimps and chunks of ham in it) with sliced mushrooms and a ton of chopped celery (wielding my excellent new kitchen angle knife!) in chicken broth — was yummy, and will make at least one more meal (several, if I decide to turn it into mostly-garbanzo soup, a sort of deranged Chinese posole).
Today’s Zippy strip finds our Pinhead musing poetically, à la Blake, on the symbolic potential of the diner:
It’s the initial quatrain of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”, as seen from a vinyl-covered counter stool
The original:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
Zippy gives us a burlesque that has a surprising gravity to it, thanks to the Blakean vision it builds on; instead of being entirely ridiculous objects of contemplation, the french fries, milkshakes, decaf coffee, and napkin dispensers of diner culture now potentially signify deeper things, just as grains of sand and common wild flowers (and robins and doves and bats and owls and so many other creatures, Blake does go on) signify for Blake: a larger order of the universe, not to mention the tension between the innocence of everyday things and the wickedness that people can commit with them.
Come, take a stool, and ponder these matters along with Zippy. We can get tuna melts, from which we will have a lot to learn. And blueberry pie, in which there is much truth.
About the poem. From Wikipedia:
“Auguries of Innocence” is a poem by William Blake, from a notebook of his now known as the Pickering Manuscript. It is assumed to have been written in 1803, but was not published until 1863 in the companion volume to Alexander Gilchrist’s biography of Blake. The poem contains a series of paradoxes which speak of innocence juxtaposed with evil and corruption.
June 5, 2023 at 9:25 am |
Decaf indeed. Infinity requires at least three mugs of the real thing.