Blaise Pascal and Other Stupid People

I don't suppose this is a "real" poem as it recounts the two times I have actually argued with beloved and good-natured friends that I had written poems that I, of course, had not.  For one, they are both short and perfect.  For two, when had I ever shown such acumen or humor?  If you catch me sleepy, I still might argue that I could have written them, if temporal reality had not got in the way.

Blaise Pascal and Other Stupid People

Twice in my life
I became so confused
That I could not remember
If it was my poem

or not.

Once, I struggled to stuff
the recurring mumblemumble of Beatrice Ravenel,
Charleston's girl, branded an occasional
poet, when she really

was mostly not.

She'd written a poem
called Fear  that I so loved
I claimed it, renamed it, though,
a much more à propos Stupid People,

but i wasn't

the poet, no, it really was the mumblemumbled
Ravenel, herself, who penned that acid
brevity, that truth that could straighten the spines
of the scoliosed.

It was not me.

In the other instance of fugitive provenance,
I fought admission with ferocity
(It was so ridiculous!) and tried to make off
with Jacques Prévert's Les paris stupides,

and imagine, still that he'd not

mind at all, but might buy me a café at some
café, and laugh and laugh and laugh.
he knew how the mind can reel
before the shrinking chasm of the original.

Here is Prévert's poem, oh --
and I often confuse Prévert with Brel,
for reasons not worth the fathom --
in its lucious back-handed smack of a kiss:


Les paris stupides:   un certain Blaise Pascal   etc… etc...

You must understand, of course,
that paris is not Paris, that a pari is
a bet, and the Pascal's bet, or Pascal's
wager, has come to cause some of us to snigger.

Pascal said, in loose translation:  ""You must wager;
it is not optional... Let us weigh the gain and the loss
in wagering that God exists...
If you gain, you gain all;

if you lose, you lose nothing.
Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists."
Some sniggered then, more snigger now,
And just as many secretly hope that he is right,

un certain Blaise Pascal, etc... etc...

The thing is, I could have written it,
had time and space allowed, if first writer
didn't have author's dibs. But as for
Ravenel, I shiver

knowing that that poem is so beyond me.

This is what the genteel lady wrote
under the rubrique of one-worded Fear:

I am only afraid 
Of the cold dull lids of eyes,
And the cold dull grain of sand in the soul,
ndurate, insensate, not to be made incandescent
Even by God.
I am afraid of the stupid people.  

All that I know, for sure,
is that I wish I could wield words
like laughing whips, riotous riata,
a sting and a laugh,
a sting and a laugh,
a slap and a deep, deep kiss.

© 2013 L. Ryan

Pensées or How-the-Mind-Works-First-Thing-in-the-Morning

The cowardly writer's way out: Potpourri! Follow the bouncing thoughts, see if they will cohere.


It is 8:17 am and the temperature inside my mouth is 99.7. I've already had Tylenol, but hardly any vodka.

I woke to find Sam-I-Am neatly curled above my head on a spare pillow, gently snoring, Marmy Girl neatly tucked into the bend of my left arm -- but did not wake fast enough to catch Dobby dozing. He is so quick to peer into my eyes, paws planted on my chest, vocalizing his many plaintes. He has a lot to say, and Fred and I allow him all the time in the world to say it.

In lieu of a lilting "bonjour, t'as passé une bonne nuit?" La Belle Bianca fairly intoned that she had dreamt all night of dead philosophers: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault. Just those three. Of the three, she had met two, and felt she had actually *known* one. She had been in the living presence of them all.

Maybe that is why she did not dream of Abélard, Aquinas, or d'Alembert.

This brought to my mind, unbidden, a poem. I am suddenly terrified, because I do not know if this is a poem written by someone else, or that I wrote myself. It feels very much like me, like mine. This is it:

Il y avait un certain Blaise Pascal.

Yes, I will "google" it, of course. But I am telling you -- even if this is not mine, it is mine. I have never felt so close to a group of words before.

Ah, yes, well. I am glad La Belle Bianca is out ferreting a new supplier of confiture de cerise (We have recently undergone a crisis of confidence in our former source. Yes, I wrote crisis of confidence. No, the reference to Jimmy Carter's fabled 1979 diagnosis of the American soul is hardly oblique. Restoration of faith and confidence -- why, this blog is about nothing less. We will, once more, have superlative confiture de cerise.)

Were she here, Bianca, Ms. Thang, would be hooting in my ear, "Ah, je ris de me voir si belle dans ce miroir..." And she'd be right on every score, for it was Prévert, no less, who wrote:

Les paris stupides:

un certain Blaise Pascal

etc… etc...

Born of Bianca's dream, my desired authorship ends as a pari stupide (a stupid bet). So long as we can escape Pascal's insipid wager, right? I have always thought it the most disheartening of proposals, the kind of thing that only brings a gleam to a clever person's eye.

"You must wager; it is not optional... Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God exists... If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists."

All the Christian apologists whom I have known have been blatant, flaming dyspeptics. Imagine if you were dedicated to defending "The Faith" by alleging it to be in happy accord with evidence that is, somewhere, on hand for examination. You'd be burping all over creation, too.

I don't know if anyone made it with me from onset to demise -- I hate to die alone -- but this actually played out quite well. It is an awesome organ, the brain, so supple.

Et la confiture de cerise? Un bon vieux classique dont on ne se lasse jamais...


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In mathematics, computing, linguistics and related disciplines, an algorithm is a sequence of instructions, often used for calculation and data processing. It is formally a type of effective method in which a list of well-defined instructions for completing a task will, when given an initial state, proceed through a well-defined series of successive states, eventually terminating in an end-state. The transition from one state to the next is not necessarily deterministic; some algorithms, known as probabilistic algorithms, incorporate randomness.
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