The Greatest Palindrome Ever

The Greatest Palindrome Ever

How often do I awake to the rising sun with it burning like a salty-sultry flare at the base of my skull?
How often do I, seated at a fine table–in a luxurious fog of elegant conversation, tuxedos, satin dresses, and a downpour of freeze-frame-perfect dishes–retreat into myself for a roll about with it (like young lovers in the summer grass)?
How often do I turn to it?
And yet every time is new, every time impossible; every time I feel the flutter of, “lt can’t be! too perfect! there’s not enough serendipity in all the worlds in all the universes in all the Eyeblinks of all the gods! It just can’t be!”
But there it is, every time, existing. I trace each word from every angle as if it were a holy mountain range and I the most devout of cartographers. But that’s no simile, that’s apt description, that’s what’s going on, that’s the only possible explanation.

a man a plan a canal panama

HOW???!!!

Why was the panama canal built?
I submit to you that, in an infinitely deep and wide linguistic, logical, metaphysical, and mind/matter coordination, the perfection inherent in that palindrome demanded a physical incarnation, demanded a referent, demanded a gash through two oceans through which ships could travel and oceans could slosh–forwards or backwards–!

I go too far?
Spend a few years with the beauty of the words and their diabolical tug on human history, on the Fates, on us humans, our ambitions, our hopes, our fears, our momentary rises and falls, our certainties and errors, or uncertainties and salvations, our blood and water lost in the gauzy-thick tropical night. Spend a little while working on the palindrome, letting it work on you, and I’m sure you find that I

that I don’t go far enough,

that no one can erect a monument to fit this amazing set of letters, meaning, and historical evolution.

The world soul slumps heavy and stolid, its actions too powerful, too sure, too subtle, too definite.

What is a human but a bit of mind/matter flotsam-jetsam upon the white-curdling cottage-cheese caps of heaven’s indifferently burbling seasong? Does a man a plan a canal panama not clearly demonstrate God’s gratuitous power, God’s indifferent hilarity, humanity’s sheepish silliness???

No, there’ll never be another like it
one is already too much
one already gives away the whole game
tells the whole story too clearly
one already makes mystics moot and science de trop
one already reduces us all to ashes poked about and doodled within by the lazy-Sunday fingertip of an infinite child who does and does not mind the appellation Zeus

Author: Sir Wilshire Willit
Directors/Producers: BW/AW
copyright: AMW

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