A NEVER-QUENCHING REQUIEM

It's already an acknowledged fact, one that has already entered into the ranks of rank platitudes, that the forces of technology and popular culture have wrung the resinous glow of language's lyric potential into a tripe-heap of transactional clichés.

Take for example the fetid phrase "bucket list," an image that sooner evokes the daily droppings of a dairy farm than the ominous epiphanies of near-death. My good friend Currado Malaspina, from the safety of his Rue Pinel atalier in the 13th arrondissment, has the proper perch upon which to comment on our pre-mortem follies. He has suggested a more poignant list, one with a pressing agenda of greater cosmological urgency.

Currado's Dream of Heaven

Currado has suggested that we begin to compile a "post-bucket" list, an afterlife agenda with plans that exceed the temporal trendiness of skydiving and cruises to Antarctica. He imagines a list of demands and complaints that one might present to a committee of deities. He dreams of meeting the expired artists of antiquity, the poets, dead and damned and luminaries like Napoleon, Tallyrand, Mendès France and Madame Curie. 

He wants to fly saddleless on Pegasus or on a sun-chariot á grande vitesse or even in the unlikely event that such creatures exist, on the fluffy white wings of beatified angels.  

As for his immediate present, while tranquil drafts of oxygen still flow frictionless through his nicotine-stained windpipe, Malaspina is happy to eat rich foods, make love, drink wine and pierce our fragile complaisance with works of art of celestial and blissful beauty.

Palimpseste Trente-Deux, Currado Malaspina, 2012