Mixed Marriages

Saul Steinberg

Mixed marriages make up much of life.
My nose that lives with my two eyes is a mixed marriage.
          (How does my nose live when eyes look down on it?) 
Body and soul share grief and dreams in their love affair.
Redheads and brunettes, poets and accountants, harpists and rappers,Tesla and bikes  
          practice melange ménage.
Certain Americans and Russians, also known as men and women, citizens of the world(s),
etc. do it.  Russians and Ukrainians take risk of the everyday erotic.
Sometimes one will run the bathroom sink while screaming, I can’t hear you when
the water’s running.
They may employ vacuum cleaners and various engines, though rarely war machines.  

Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, mixed marriage of the ardent.  Tolstoy the pacifist, the vegetarian, the disciplinarian who insisted that Levin (Anna K) thresh his fields.  Only fools would grab sabres, run to kill others, with great faith and grandeur, to save fellow Slavs.  In August, subvert nature and its harvest, let villages starve while sending villagers to fight long-distance wars? Dostoevsky livid, he wanted to take Constantinople.

Tools required: nimble minds.  Torah students must argue 70 interpretations, fully inhabiting each point of view.  After diving into the kinks, pits, ears, and flesh of each angle, they reject most.  But they hold the key. They have recovered unknown faces.

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