Sparks of joy: Birthday coming. Inogen on Mark’s big sketch book page. Gratitude. Waxing crescent Moon. Cold and snow on the way. The possibility of vaccines.
isle of the dead, arnold brocklin
Rabbi Jamie asked us to take six words out of Psalm 23 then write 6 verses using them. I took words from his translation: Death’s door, solitude, fear, harmonies, valleys, and grace. Here is my psalm/poem using them:
Death’s door opens both ways
Into my solitude and back out
Erasing my fear
From its threshold cosmic harmonies spill out
Filling the valleys of our lives
With the grace of eternity.
Kollwitz
I’ve been thinking about radical aloneness coupled with necessary linkages. As humans, our skin bounds us, binds us. Only we know the inner life of our Self, our soul, our unique journey through this random gift of sentience. Yet. We have no language to know the journey without the necessary linkage to another, to others. We have no food to eat without the necessary linkage to the products of the soil. We have no learning without the quickening of our senses by necessary linkages to reality. (whatever that is.)
It’s a peculiar and often devastating truth, our radical aloneness. It’s both ironic and salvific that we cannot be radically alone without necessary linkages to others, to food, to the world beyond us. Covid has made the global scope of our linkages evident in spite of our radical aloneness.
I would say each one of us IS an island surrounded by an ocean of others. On our island are the structures we’ve built, the colors we’ve used to paint them, the roads that lead forward and backward through the story of our life. It is a mobile island. We have to take it with us wherever and whenever we go.
It has rickety bridges, poorly maintained causeways for the transport of food and air. There are several viewing platforms and from our island we can see other viewing platforms. Are they on other islands? A quirk of perception makes it impossible to know.
Even so we are often at our platforms, looking out, using flags to send signals. The others use flags too but we cannot be sure their flags mean the same as ours. They often look similar, but it’s impossible to know for sure.
I’m signaling right now. Arms flashing, plucking flags from their stanchions, returning others. Thinking of you, imagining you and your island. I hope things are ok there.
Wednesday gratefuls: Yeti USB Microphone. Podcasting. Maybe. Impeachment. Trial. Reminder. Biden at work. The boggy reality of our politics. Tom’s poems and science facts. Perseverance, on track for February 18th touchdown on Mars. The things we’ve seen. Wind. Cold. Snow. On its way.
Sparks of Joy: Wolves and their predation. Coming soon to Colorado. Vaccines. Leigh Thompson. Ruth. Seoah. Murdoch. The Sun in the blue Sky.
Just watched two videos, one 13 minutes long and one over 5 minutes. They were evidence in the trial of 45. If you haven’t seen them, maybe you shouldn’t. They’re brutal and reveal the underlying problems we have. This degree of anger and misdirected rage will not slink away. It will be underwritten and reinforced by these videos. They’re good evidence for the trial, no doubt, but I know many of the Proud Boy ilk will see them as moments of glory, as prolegomena to a future assault. A “better” one.
Right now, on this mountain and on the ones nearby, I’m sure some patriots are loading rounds, polishing their weapons, listening to Rush and Alex Jones. When will be the next time to muster ourselves? The constitution has never been in such peril. Our country can’t survive. What if Biden dies and Harris becomes President? We’re all screwed, that’s what. We gotta fight now.
Cousin Diane told me about an NPR report on the flocking of Far Right activists to Germany for rock concerts, gatherings with other, international groups like ours. Germany! The notions of human equality, equal rights under the law, the vote as a means of ensuring democratic governance have their enemies all round the globe.
Yes, this is an imperfect nation. Watch equally disturbing videos from the execution of George Floyd, the shooting of protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin by Kyle Rittenhouse. Remember the middle passage. Jim Crow. Immigrant children separated from their families. News headlines about the Yellow Peril. Women’s suffrage and all the struggles since then for women’s equal rights.
And, yes, these imperfections demand action now. Right now.
These Far Right folks are only part of the barrier to those actions. Corporate capitalism also stands in the way. So does the insidious nature of sexism and racism, infecting many who declare they want to do better. But somehow can’t.
The next few years will be the true trial for this nation’s soul. We will be part of it, you and me. What will your grandchildren say about your actions?
Tuesday grateful: Dr. Leigh Thompson. Zoom. Mary and Diane. Winds auguring change in the weather. Blue Skies and Sun. Safeway pickup. Chili for the snow coming. Melons to cut up. Kate, always Kate. Impeached. Now convict. Go Senate. Vote to shame.
Sparks of joy: The thought of Puppies. Maybe a Puppy here? The brilliant Sun. Walking upstairs each morning to my library and writing studio. Remembering Gertie this morning with Kate. The trial in the Senate.
So obstructionist Senator Mitch McConnell thinks Marjorie Taylor Greene is a cancer on GOP country? Well, I say they’re both diseases that might well prove fatal to our democracy. If not, and I certainly hope not, it won’t be because they failed to take extremist stands when it served them well. Both of them. This is a splendid example of cancer calling the cancer cancer. A metastasized plague on both of their houses.
It ain’t over by a long shot. Imagine all those always Trumpers ought there right now. They’re adding extra flags to their pickups, buying up guns and ammo, donning camo and getting ready to join their friends at your state house. Well-armed militias my ass. These are armed gangs, thugs, waiting for a leader, 45 or someone else, to loose them on their enemies: libtards, Black and Brown and Red and Yellow, all those rainbow folks, politicians.
Oh, wait. 45 did that, didn’t he? That’s what this trial is about in the Senate. Incitement to insurrection. Right. I saw the movie. If they did that, stormed the U.S. Capitol in the name of Gadsen flag patriotism and Confederate Battle Flag dreams, sure seems like they’ll be willing to head into Denver, Sacramento, Indianapolis, Lansing (again).
No, even organized they’re not strong enough or smart enough to fight the U.S. military, but they don’t have to be. All guerillas everywhere know how to carry the fight in asymmetrical warfare. Hell, a lot of those AK47 carrying lunatics probably learned from the Vietcong when they were in ‘Nam. Can you spell irony?
These are our homegrown Al Qaeda’s, Hezbollah’s, ISIS’s. No, not Muslim. Oh, hell no. No rag head holy book for these geniuses. No, they follow the much more holy Q-anon script. Or the rantings of Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones. If it looks like a cult, and quacks like a cult…
This is a long term problem. It’s not one that can be solved by executive order or Federal legislation. Good criminal investigations could cripple the Far Right, though.
Even then, we have to offer a better America to truly and finally counter them. We have to have a just America in which people of color no longer feel Derek Chauvin’s knee on their neck. We have to have a fair America where people of color, the rainbow folks, all left behind citizens have enough to eat, a place to sleep, health care, and the opportunity to not only train for a job but a job itself. In this America the silly buggers in red MAGA hats and American flag clothing will become irrelevant.
Defense and offense. Both will be necessary for years to come. We need to get on with it. Starting now.
Monday gratefuls: Kate speaks her heart. Rigel starts eating again. The Monk Manual. Wind. And the weather it carries. Black Mountain. Maxwell Creek. Upper Bear Creek. Cub Creek. Shadow Brook. Waning crescent Moon. The stars of early morning. The heart that beats in my chest.
Points of joy: Kep eager for breakfast. Being with the Ancient Ones. Imagining more of Jennie’s Dead. Exhaustion after the new workout. Using the Monk Manual.
When I started on the post yesterday, it focused on art, religion, legend, mythology, fairy tales, folklore. Got distracted while writing and shifted away from my main idea. Back at it this morning.
My library has three full shelves of mythology and folklore, its historical context. Another two full shelves of books on art. Another two of religion and philosophy and poetry. The bookshelf immediately to my right has texts about the intersection of religion, philosophy, and the natural world. That represents an ongoing investigation for me, how to reconcile humanity to a sustainable presence on this earth.
Just to be complete my library also includes shelves of fiction, a full shelf of works on Lake Superior and its context, travel, gardening, the military, American and Western history, including a good deal on the American Civil War.
I used to think religion and folklore and legend and mythology and fairy tales occupied different terrain. Art, too. But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve stripped dogma from my approach to religion, the more the boundaries disappear. Of course religion is this generation’s mythology. To be studied later in the classics department of a long away in the future university. Fairy tales and folklore and legend were the work of scientists, humans seeking patterns in nature, explanations for the forces that influence, shape, and sometimes take our lives.
Perhaps my immersion, my lifelong immersion, in these fields means that I reject the Enlightenment, at least in its empiricist modality. It might. The question. How can I find knowledge and truth in physics, biology, astronomy, geology yet retain a naive faith in the possibility of something all those disciplines cannot explain?
The new atheists like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett have a flat earth attitude toward wonder, mystery, delight, whimsy. In their mean and stolid world only that which can be seen, measured, replicated has meaning. They are descendants of the logical positivists and the language philosophers. Perhaps the best expression of this attitude is Wittgenstein’s famous quote: “Whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent.”
Whether or not he meant it that way, most thinkers who want to discard the mantel of dogma and its many obfuscations believe he meant, if it’s not empirical, we can know nothing and say nothing about it. This follows from Kant’s understanding of the ding an sich, the thing in itself. Kant believed there was a reality, he was no idealist, but he also believed that since we could only know what our senses brought us we could never know that reality itself, just the effects it had on our eyes, our hands, our ears, our nose, our taste.
There is a bald truth here. Our sensorium equips us to navigate a world delivered to us through our bodies. We can learn a lot about this world by being very careful about what we perceive. Yet at the end of theoretical physics, at the end of cosmology, at the end of life’s study of itself, at the end of consciousness, we have only an elaborate construction based on empirical data. As we know, any specific instance of that construction is often wrong, because science itself proceeds through revolutions in thought paradigms as much as it does through the empirical method.
In Celtic mythology the world of Faery, the world of pixies, faeries, goblins, the dead, and the divine is The Other World. What a world it is. I’ve recently imagined it, in my underway novel Jennie’s Dead, as a vast and open land where old gods go after their followers abandon them. Where characters of myth and legend still have adventures. Where travel between lands may take thousands of years or be finished in an instant.
What an impoverished, skinny world the new atheists and their philosophical forbearers inhabit. I prefer the company of Aladdin, of Shiva, of Lao Tze, of Herman Hesse, of Zeus and Lycaon, even of Jesus and Moses.
green knight
My sense of wonder awakens daily as I do. The Lodgepole pines out the bedroom window sway in the Wind. The Stars twinkle and shine above them in a black early morning Sky. A Mountain Lion coughs far away. In the fall the strangled call of a bugling Elk might make its way here. I’ve just come from the land of dreams, another non-empirical realm, and my Other World senses are on high alert, having spent a nighttime tuned to the flashes of neurons, the pulsing of brain cells switching on and off.
Poetry sweeps away the cobways of linear thought, carrying the reader into the realm of aha. Of, oh, I see. Of distant caverns unimaginable to man. The room of the Raven exists first in Poe’s mind, then on the page, then in ours. But how does it exist, ontologically? If you say only in ink on paper, my how little you know.
I’ve traveled Russian cart tracks holding hands with the staret of the Pilgrim. I swam the waters deeper than the Mariani’s Trench with the Megladon. I’ve walked on foreign worlds and spoken with aliens. Harry Seldon and I together pondered psychohistory. I’ve played the glass bead game, gotten into a Louisiana bar with a bottle of Trublood in my hand. The Caliph and I entertained Jinn. Huck Finn and I tossed a line in the waters of the Great Muddy.
These eternal inhabitants of the Other World are our guides. They know the ancientrails on which we humans travel and want us to use them to our utmost benefit.
You and I were a speck of ohr during the obliteration of the ayn sof. We’ve traveled together and apart for billions of years, been part of so many things, witnessed so many others. When God is repaired, we may join up again and sit with Rumi, a jug of wine at hand, blessed to be in that far off land beyond right and wrong.
Advice from María Sabina, Mexican healer and poet – “Heal yourself with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon. With the sound of the river and the waterfall. With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds. Heal yourself with mint, neem, and eucalyptus. Sweeten with lavender, rosemary, and chamomile. Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a hint of cinnamon. Put love in tea instead of sugar and drink it looking at the stars. Heal yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs of the rain. Stand strong with your bare feet on the ground and with everything that comes from it. Be smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with your forehead. Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier. Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember … you are the medicine.”
Sunday gratefuls: Beau Jo’s pizza. Easy Entree’s Chicago beef sandwiches. Keepin’ me sane. Kate. Somewhat better days. Trying new things with her nourishment. That crescent Moon. Sleeping through the night. Invisible City, a short Netflix series featuring Brazilian folklore. Latin American magical realism. 100 Years of Solitude. Marquez.
Folklore. Legend. Fairy tales. Mythology. Religion. Art. These are some of my favorite things.
Just finished the short series, Invisible City, on Netflix. It features Brazilian folktale creatures like the Saci, the Cuca, the Cucupira, the pink River Dolphin. Green Frontier, a Colombian series from 2017, focuses on the Amazonian forest and the supernatural.
Netflix and to a lesser extent, Amazon Prime and HBO Max, keep offering films and television series from all over the world. I love this, especially the original programming on Netflix produced by local creatives in their own language and in their own thought worlds. The supernatural dramas draw me in though they vary a great deal in quality.
I also love dramas and mysteries that show life in different places. Gomorrah, organized crime in Naples. The Alienist, turn of the century (19th to 20th) New York, Monarca, contemporary Mexico City, Wild District, contemporary life in Bogota and the lives of guerillas. Many others.
Since I can’t get out, get around, these days, travel comes to me. The anthropologist in me loves the folktales, the cultures, the different mores. And the ticket price is far lower.
Reading lately. Finished a few chess related novels after watching the amazing Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. Finishing Theodora Gossa’s European Travels for Monstrous Women and will pick up Kim Stanley Robinson’s, the Ministry of the Future next. Science fiction and fantasy also live in the fairy tale, folktale, legendary realm.
Writing. Jennie’s Dead. Ancientrails. Writing a Psalm for the Rabbi Jamie class. Not as much as I’d like, more than I’ve been doing. Just bought some Brazilian folklore books. Might be good basis for a new novel.
I have another novel idea I’ve been kicking around for years, one that would examine white supremacy, maybe militias. This one emerges not from the favorite things I mentioned above, but from my growing up years in Indiana. Like my buddy Mark Odegard this work sustains me, even though it may never see the light of day.
My birthday’s coming up and I’m playing with the idea of a podcast or a Patreon website on which I would read my own novels, figure out some sort of subscription service. Not a new idea, novels were sometimes published in newspapers, magazines, in serial fashion. Combine my speaking voice with my creative voice. The birthday part of this is buying items for a podcasting studio.
Friend Alan Rubin has a lot of experience in audio recording and has created a studio for himself to do voice overs and commercials. He’s advised me. I’ve watched Youtube videos and just bought Audio for Authors, a book about this sort of project.
So, yes, the creative me stays alive, is never far from my consciousness.
The only rule is to work. From a list of rules by John Cage. That’s the trick. Persistence.
Saturday gratefuls: Good Stock. Soups. 2.0 calorie nutrients for Kate. Kate. Always, Kate. Kep, so happy for breakfast. Literally jumping up and down. Cooler weather. Sleep. Until 7 this morning. Biden says no 45 intelligence briefings. Biden pushes relief package. As is. Vaccines. Covid. Awake. Rather than woke.
Relishing the relief. No need to cringe when reading headlines. No need to jump out of my chair and hit the streets to comment publicly on a Presidential statement. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Biden’s win has taken a dark bowl off my back, set it down in the basement, the deep basement, (OK, Mar-a-Lago) where it belongs. It’s not alone down there. The dark bowl of slavery is there. Of white supremacy. Of fascism and fascists. Many others.
But, don’t become complacent. That basement is our cultural shadow. These bowls are not gone. They can be drunk from again. Still. Only owning them, why they’re part of us, part of our communal life, can break the bowls and let their foul liquids seep into the bowels of hell from whence they came. We’re not ready for that yet.
Though. He who will not be named’s Presidency did do us service in that regard. Surfacing our shadow, bringing into the light. Giving it visibility. Charlottesville. January 6, a shadow epiphany. George Floyd. Drink bleach. Shine a light up your rectum. Deregulate oil and gas. Don’t read. Don’t learn. Don’t embrace or love your neighbor, instead take their kids and put them in a cage. Yes, we saw all of this. Good. It’s not gone away. It’s only resting in the deep basement of our national psyche. Below the National Archives, I imagine.
The work that comes next. That will be the hardest. Essential work and in these matters we are all essential workers.
Not now. Beat back Covid. Restore the economy. Shift to renewable energy. Reform policing. Extend a hand to those who would live in the land of the free and the brave. Breathe. Relax.
The time will come to admit that the Klan served all white people. The time will come to admit we were all addicted to oil and gas. The time will come to admit that people who are different scare all of us. The time will come to say, yes, we outsourced our fears to the police, to ICE, to militia groups, to the NRA. The time will come.
The time is now though to make critical thinking and science education a key part of every American’s education. Media literacy, a way of understanding that not all we read or see is true. These skills, their lack, has sickened us almost to the point of death. Fix them now. Now.
Friday gratefuls: Kate. Scott. Bill’s tough assignment for Sunday morning. Seeing into ourselves. And talking about it. Biden. Better than expected. He’s got momentum. And, public opinion. 45 fading out. His impeachment. Colder weather here. Sleep. The Psalms.
from 2016
No more checking on the idiot. Thank god. Still, for the duration of the impeachment his peculiar style of unthinking, thought garbling, strangled rationales is on display. Gee, his lawyers, the first group, didn’t think he could make a good argument that the election was a fraud. Hmm. The next set convinced him that a constitutional argument made sense. Doesn’t matter anyhow since Republicans (what does that word even mean) won’t calve a 17 vote iceberg to sink his Titanic. More’s the pity.
It’s important, I believe, to try him for inciting insurrection. No matter the political reality of judgement. If it were up to me, I’d have the Attorney General arrest him for sedition. Try him. Sentence him for as long as his unnatural life lasts. He likes orange so it shouldn’t be much of a hardship.
Rabbi Hillel
After some prodding by Rabbi Jamie, I’m going to pick up the study of Psalms this morning at 9:30 a.m. I’m three classes behind, but he assured me I could catch up, no problem. We’re going to work on the 23rd Psalm today.
One insight I’ve had in re-reading it, reading his translation, reading a couple of others. Walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Or, through death’s dark vale as another has it. I always imagined this as a personal confrontation with death, my death, your death. Not sure why I thought that, but I did.
Now, it’s clear to me that the issue is grief. Death’s dark veil thrown over life. Mom’s death. Regina Schmidt’s. 450,000 Covid deaths. We are in death’s penumbra as we have not been in my lifetime, save perhaps for the Vietnam War.
I shall fear no Trump, no matter what he doth.
Looking forward to this class. It’s been a long slog with Kate and with Covid, mostly life shaved down to workouts, sleep, cooking, shopping for food, TV. Not much intellectual challenge. It’s like meat and drink for me, learning.
When I look inside, as Bill has suggested we do for this Sunday, and define myself, I first see a student. A curious man. Not sure why I never moved from student to scholar, but I never did. I’m a fine student though and learning feeds my soul.
Thursday gratefuls: Wolves and their moon. Deb Brown and her workouts. The Monk Manual. A better afternoon and evening for Kate. Buddy Mark’s swallow test. A Fib and its treatments. Vaccines. Covid. The writers for the Alienist, Titans, Gomorrah, 30 Coins. Writers, books, printers, ink, distributors. Podcasts. Oh, came back up here to mention: 45 gone.
100 days. Another tradition. A lot of juice for an incoming president and their administration. How they use it often determines the effectiveness of their presidency. Biden has made moves worthy of a change agent President. His long time in the senate, 36 years, could make him an LBJ lite. I say lite because he doesn’t have the Democratic majorities that Johnson did, nor does he have Johnson’s personality.
The leavening aspects for Biden’s presidency are the long reign of error and mendacity, rampant stupidity and cupidity that preceded him. The Covid crisis in both its medical and economic forms. The final triumph of climate science. Now policy must follow. The George Floyd stoked rise of Black Lives Matter and the surge of Black and Latino voters. They provide a platform for strong, effective reform of policing.
The $%!!@#$%^ Republicans cannot bring themselves to do more than slap Marjory Greene on the wrist. Bad girl. This means the slime, the Thing still covers GOP minds, corrodes any hope it has of returning to normal political party status. We need Trump’s Patriot Party. Carve off these deluded folks and clump them together.
Rabbi Jamie wanted me to be part of a class on the Psalms, “Psalms Resung in a Kabbalistic Key.” Called me twice. I’ve missed three classes, but I decided to give it a try. Tomorrow morning will be my first time. Zoom, of course. Something hard, mind-bending, scholarly. Yes. Much needed.
Yesterday, as I cleaned off my art table which I had allowed to become loaded with filing, I turned on Pandora. Bette Midler, the Rose. Lacrimae. On the Wings of an Angel. More tears. Guess I’m carrying a load of sadness not very far from conscious awareness. Surprised me. Then, it didn’t. Felt good.
Kate seems to be having a good start to her day, down to make her breakfast, get her some coffee. Tomorrow.
Monday gratefuls: Easy Entrees bacon wrapped pork tenderloins. Green Beans. Kate’s no nausea days. House cleaning today. LLBean and my new shearling hurricane shirt. The Ancient Ones tell stories around the council fire. Tom’s story. 45 gone. 46 doing stuff I like. Feel better. Imbolc.
The Ewes, the pregnant Ewes. Milk for their Lambs. Means Milk for all. For Cheese. For children. Imbolc. In the belly. In Ireland this is and was the birthing time for Sheep. The Lambs came; the Ewes freshened; the family fed on food not stored over the long fallow time.
It was clear the promise of the day after the Winter Solstice was not false. There would be another spring, another freshening of the earth. All would be well, all manner of things would be well.
What a precious and delightful time. Lambs gamboling. Suckling. Milk squirted directly into children’s mouths. All delighted by the miracle of birth and renewal.
Hard to put ourselves in the place of people who subsisted on stored Grains, Vegetables, smoked Meats over the long fallow time begun on Samain, Summer’s End, and lasting until today.
Brigid, the Triple Goddess. Her day. This from a wikipedia article:
She is the goddess of all things perceived to be of relatively high dimensions such as high-rising flames, highlands, hill-forts and upland areas; and of activities and states conceived as psychologically lofty and elevated, such as wisdom, excellence, perfection, high intelligence, poetic eloquence, craftsmanship (especially blacksmithing), healing ability, druidic knowledge and skill in warfare.
Poetry, the smithy, and the hearth were her domains, thus the Triple Goddess. The often week long festivals the Celts celebrated on their four cross quarter days: Imbolc, Beltane (May 1), Lughnasa (August 1), and Samain (October 31st) gave villagers a break from their subsistence lives. A chance to play, to sing, dance, trade, honor their gods and goddesses.
Imbolc was also a time for discerning weather, peeking into the immediate future. Hoping for Spring, but knowing it could still be distant. It was this tradition that has translated in the U.S. into Groundhog Day. Here’s a Scottish proverb that suggests the link. Bride is Brigit.
Thig an nathair as an toll
Là donn Brìde,
Ged robh trì troighean dhen t-sneachd
Air leac an làir.
The serpent will come from the hole
On the brown Day of Bríde,
Though there should be three feet of snow
On the flat surface of the ground.[37]
Imbolc is a good day to consider those freshened thoughts and projects you have. What came up for you during the dark, fecund days of Winter? Are there dreams or hopes or works you imagined then that need a push right now? You can ask Brigit for help. It’s her big day and she’s listening.
If you have an artesian well nearby or know of one, you could also follow the ancient Celtic practice of dressing the wells. On these holidays the Irish, the Welsh, The Scots, the Cornish, the Manx, and Bretons would, in ancient times, take flowers to the well, make corn dollies representing Brigit and leave them there, tie rags with wishes and prayers to shrubs and trees nearby.
These Holy Wells are pathways to the Otherworld, the world of Faery, and a place where the Holy Ones pay attention to the needs of the common person.
Brigit, the Triple Goddess, is a Fire Goddess, and at Kincaid in Ireland a double monastery, men and women, kept her eternal flame alive throughout the year. Might be a good day to have a Fire in the Fireplace, her hearth, and consider the creativity her Holy spirit represents.
Welcome all to the blessed season of Imbolc. May your projects blaze up and warm you and yours.
