Daily Archives: October 16, 2013

Politics

Go Now, You’re No Longer Needed

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Fall                                                                           Samhain Moon

Translated into English the Latin Mass has closing words that always get me, “Go now, the Mass is ended.” They may have changed a bit since the last time I went, but it sounds like the bums rush.  We’re done; you can leave.

It came to mind when I read on the NYT’s site that the shutdown is over and the default avoided.  To the Republicans I say, “Go now, your term has ended.”  They inflicted real pain on the economy, looked like spoiled pre-schoolers or practicing alcoholics who want what they want and want it now and only burned through political capital for no achievement.  They do not deserve to sit in a deliberative body charged with solving our common problems, not creating them.

I read a very interesting NYT op ed piece on what the risk is of the shutdown strategy, Democracy After the Shutdown.  It threatens the social compact on which our government depends.  That’s a big deal.  Read the article and see if you agree with it.  I did.

Art and Culture, Poetry, Writing

Out There, Man

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Fall                                                               Samhain Moon

The beats.  for beatific.  A generation I have begun to feel more now, reading them in ModPo.  I never read them, ignored them as quaint, anachronistic for the rebellion, my rebellion, our rebellion, the 60’s.  Now looking back at them, imagining them as outriders on the buttoned up, nuclear overcast, post-war suburban build out to conformity culture in which I was young, now I can see.  And hear.  They inhabited a margin unimaginable from the center of Levittown, a world of China and tea with no oriental associations, a rootless, roving busload of wearers of black, makers of poetry, listeners to jazz, respecting no sexual or social conventions.  Out there, man.

(Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Lafcadio Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso in 1956)

Now.  Now I hear the Howl and have listened to Kerouac’s strangely charismatic voice, speaking through digital technology only barely coming to be in his own time.  These are not my people.  I am not of them.  But they are our people, our American outsiders.  Buoys on the shipping lanes of middle class culture warning out beyond here there be monsters.  My people are political.  The beats were not.  We used acid and mescaline and peyote, they turned to heroin.  They found their place in poetry and wandering and improvisation; we found ours in the street, organizing, fighting.  Different.  But the same.

(Carl Solomon, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs at the Gotham Book Mart, New York City, 1977)

American outsider voices.  All amplified in that strange alien language spoken only where the commuters never ride.  Where the matron never serves tea.  Where the only hope is purity and clarity and the archetypal.  Never sullied by bills and jobs and diapers and cars breaking down.  Out there surfing the big breaks of idealism that crest upon the shore of America the Capitalist and America the Conformist.

(Train Station, by Bernice Sims)

I hear them now, speaking in their cadences at night in coffee houses, pounding small drums and shouting into the microphone about pain and angels and doomed love.

Writing

A bit of babble flow after Kerouac

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Fall                                                                     Samhain Moon

listen the quiet surround me buzzing in my ears a bit of hard drive back up whir and shift that oceanic feeling of the yard and teh sky and the north behind me a sense that i Don’t sit here but everywhere, a point, not a line, no particular place though planted here I could also be there where the lift bridge rises and the fog horn sounds or where the Mississippi babbles small brookish out of the old Lake Itasca where Schoolcraft became a student of the head waters which water the head and make us all wet, yet hydrated, not dried out but nourished and ready to grow, growing up in this northern land where the sun rises and sets half way to the north pole where we know we are closer to the north pole than the rest of America below us in particular, for example, Georgia with those peach and pecan orchards and the stars and bars and the sound of NASCAR revving, internal combustion sound music, not annoying sound, but beautiful, wound up and spinning around the track we go up to Washington DC where the white and the marble and the monuments and the documents, the talking and collaborating, the glad-hands and false smiles mean work, work of the people.  Work.

Health

Clarity

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Fall                                                             Samhain Moon

Eye doc today said I had aniscoria.  Unequal pupils.  It means, in this instance, that my eyes don’t work together too well while reading, causing the type to float a bit, creating stress when I read a regular book rather than my kindle.  On my kindle I can adjust the size of the type to compensate.  Not been a problem until recently though the aniscoria is longstanding.  So, a pair of reading glasses.  Necessary because my eyes no longer adjust for each others differences.  And they used to.  I’m looking forward to clear reading.

I go to an ophthalmologist twice a year due to an unusual retinal nerve.  Each time one of them looks in my eye they go, “Oh, my. Let’s see how this looked last time.” Always the same.  So far.  For over 25 years.

These bi-annual or so visits, next week’s the dentist, the first week of November a colonoscopy, some people see as a nuisance.  I see these routines in the same way I see preventive maintenance on the car.  See a problem ahead of time and it’s easier to fix.  I can’t say I like them or dislike them.  They’re like eating your peas.

(Will Eisner)

Most of us have some quirk here or there that requires professional attention.  We’re not clones and each of us is unique.  A former internist said we were, to a certain extent, all black boxes.  That is, our personal version of humanity deviates to a greater or lesser degree from the norm.  Most of the time I’m happier with greater.  In these matters though…

General

A Different Country

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Fall                                                                      Samhain Moon

Flying from the heat of southern Georgia to the rainy chill of the northern exurbs of the Twin Cities gives a sense of the size of this country and its diversity.  Being in Georgia, in so many ways, felt like being in a different country.  It was hot.  Peaches and pecans graced billboards and grocery store shelves.  The Walking Dead seemed only a hedge away off Highway 75.  The military and African-Americans were visible in numbers.  Southern cooking was not a cookbook, but a way of life.  The stars and bars flew on pick-up trucks, rusted or not, with dog or not.  And there was, lingering there in the heated air, a faint rebel yell, a sign the Civil War (an oxymoron I just realized) was not over.

The rain and news of frost gladden my heart as do the russet and gold in our woods, the leaf pocked yard.  The fallow time has begun and this gardener, for one, is glad.  It was a wonderful, but busy growing season.

Good to be home.