Monthly Archives: August 2023

Acting, Asia, Writing

Fusion energy

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Lughnasa and the Herme Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: A great workout yesterday. Murdoch, the hooman. 15 days till Korea. Whoa. 11 days till the showcase. Whoa! Memorizing. Acting. Writing. My new idea for a novel. Desiderata day. Great Sol, our energy, our life. The Wild Neighbors. Han Shan. Chinese poetry. Chan Buddhism. Asian history. K-dramas. Korean literature. China. Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Monkey’s Journey to the West. The Dream of the Red Chamber. Outlaws of the Marsh.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Asia

One brief shining: Murdoch sat hind legs crouched, front legs straight on the leather bench next to my son, gazing across the table at another man in a blue US Airforce t-shirt as if ready to join the conversation and I got three pictures in quick succession from Seoah across the 9,000 miles that separate us something families do.

 

Closing in on being off book for The Trail to Cold Mountain. Maybe today, certainly this week. Good thing since the showcase is a week from Saturday. Remembered I have logs in the back already cut. Will try to lift one this evening. Still no cloak or boots. I’ve gone from being frustrated and tired of the whole thing back to energized.

When I work on things like this, I have them in my head as a priority task. All the time. You know, that nagging thing you need to finish. But can’t quite seem to get to. At least not enough to close it out. At some point with each of my novels I’ve reached that point. The energy drains out of them. The story is stale. It’ll never be any good. I want to chuck it, start over, or start something new.

Got there with the Trail to Cold Mountain last week. I had to perform last during the class. It was well past 8 and I was tired, my body beginning to wind down for sleep. I gave an unspirited, clunky version of my piece. Fell right into the writer/actor abyss. Why have I bothered with this? I’ll never act anyway. Maybe I’ll say I can’t make the showcase. Won’t matter. I’ve done what I wanted.

Except. I didn’t. I kept memorizing even though it felt like a waste. Then, a breakthrough. As I got close to having it all down, my excitement about Han Shan and even the work I’d written returned. I can do this. I’ll introduce Chinese Rivers and Mountains poetry to a new audience, blending my words and his. Donning the costume, using the gourd water bottle and the logs, the parchment paper filled with Cold Mountain’s poetry. Herme will have his night to shine.

And, it just occurred to me, that threshold will be crossed. In the months after Kate died I felt and lived like a hermit with benefits. Friends, that is. The notion of the Hooded Man from the Tarot Deck, so strong an archetype for me. I had him created in neon. Herme.

Now I’m bringing that archetype to life, blending it with the Asian pivot my whole family, save for me, has made. A fusion of life with family Mary, Mark, Seoah, my son, Murdoch, the Jangs, life with friends Tal, Alan, Joan, Deb, Rebecca, and life with CBE-classes held there, performance at the synagogue’s amphitheater, Tal my teacher, the Rabbi’s son.

To be clear. This does not constitute all I wanted to do with the threshold ceremony. I still want to do the mezuzah hanging ritual and a celebration of male aging. Pushing it off to next year, maybe my birthday. 77.

Judaism, Korea, Politics, Travel, US History, World History

Nations. Divided.

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Lughnasa and the Herme Moon

Monday gratefuls: Murdoch. That funny guy. Leo, gone home. Luke. Tal. 48 degrees. Clear Sky. Great Sol brightening the Lodgepoles and Black Mountain. Great Sol’s angle already beginning to visibly decline. The harvest season underway. The Midwest. Its farms and farmers. Its humidity. The arid West. Its Mountains. Dogs. All Dogs. Of all time. Angels. Love incarnate. The Sacred. Revelation.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Dogs

One brief shining: A Dog lays her head in your lap, gazes up at you with adoration, follows you on a walk, waits for you at the door when you come home tired from work, tail wagging, eyes filled with you only you and you reach down, pat her, scratch behind her ears, then the world comes into focus.

 

Realized only yesterday that my travels this year will take me to two divided nations, Israel and Korea. Very different in the origin of the divisions, yes, one xenophobic and the other bemoaned on both sides yet hardened and both societies with strong military presences, the threat of imminent conflict always in the air. I wonder what to look for, how to gauge the impact of the Arab/Israeli conflict on day-to-day life in both Israel and the West Bank. In Korea the division separates a nation into two parts, a  Southern and Northern, yet considered one country by all Koreans. How though does the continuing division affect the average Korean? Not my main reason for visiting either place yet a dominant reality in both.

After my conversion in Jerusalem, I will have a strong personal stake in both countries. A Jew considering the life of Israel. And, a father-in-law with a Korean daughter-in-law, my son stationed in Korea for four years. Also, the Jang family, Seoah’s brother, two sisters, nieces and nephews, her mother and father. The deep wounds in both countries have increased significance for me.

Makes me wonder about the soft division (compared to Israel and Korea) that has come to dominate American politics. About its impact on our body politic here. How does a nation fare when large numbers of its citizens disagree on the fundamentals of what it means to be a nation? What is, after all, a nation? Certainly it requires some minimal cohesion among its resident population.

This Wikipedia entry, nation, has a nice precis of what the word has meant and might mean in the future. It’s important to remember that the nation state is a relatively recent invention, most scholars agreeing that the modern nation state arose in the 17th century. I found this quote from the Wiki helpful: “The consensus among scholars is that nations are socially constructed, historically contingent, and organizationally flexible.” My mental ears perked up at the first two terms: socially constructed and historically contingent.

Yes. Israel came into being in 1947, a recent expression of an old homeland, one imposed on an existing territory already occupied by Jews and Arab. Socially constructed as a necessary antidote to the horrors of Hitler’s Germany, yet oh so historically contingent as an increasingly large swath of the diaspora, Palestinians, and progressive Israelis argue it must change its nature as a nation. It is refusing to be organizationally flexible.

Korea though is an ethnic nation divided by modern politics. Both South Korea and North Korea socially constructed by the historical contingencies of big power politics, the Cold War, of the 1950’s. Because of those ties of ethnicity, most Koreans on both sides of the border yearn for unification.

Yet here. Here. The standout phrase. Historically contingent. As in, will not necessarily always exist. The nature of our socially constructed reality? Contested. Is there an organizational structure that can contain both far right and liberal Americans? That is our big question.

 

 

 

Acting, Politics, US History

A Mushroom Cloud of lies and conspiracy theories

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Lughnasa and the Herme Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Memorizing The Trail to Cold Mountain. Seoah, my son, Murdoch. Korea. Brother Mark. Sister Mary. Gabe and Ruth. Kate, always Kate. Jon, a memory. A Foggy morning. 48 degrees. Magic the Gathering. Korean competition. Sky Castle. K-dramas. Writing. A new novel idea. Getting ready for the long journeys. Israel trip meeting today. Packing gifts for Korea.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Fog

One brief shining: Fingers curve over the keyboard as I learned in high school typing almost 60 years ago a manual skill one of the few I learned well, how to fell a tree, limb it, and buck it another, suppose you have to add driving, and there you have it.

 

I’m close on memorizing The Trail to Cold Mountain. A couple of more hours today and I’ll be even closer. On the 19th I’ll have all the poems as a prop, but not what I’ve written. My costume still lacks a cloak and hood, boots. Gotta get on those this week. Satisfying.

 

Toobin’s book, Homegrown, details the lives of several feckless men and women folks whose lives never managed to crystallize. Failed marriages, bouts of unemployment dotted with rants, seeking a culprit and finding one in the Federal government.

McVeigh spent much of his adult life going from one gun show to another, often driving thousands of miles in a week. Toobin illustrates how gun shows are a carrier of the far right pathogen. At the larger ones there were sessions on the Constitution, what really happened at Waco and Ruby Ridge, how to become a sovereign citizen, survivalist skills. Then there is the gunshow loophole which allows individuals to sell guns and ammunition with no checks of any kind. This still exists.

While on the road McVeigh listened to Rush Limbaugh, often for hours at a time. At night he had a shortwave radio and listened to a similar podcast from Arizona. His friend Timothy Nichols added the plight of farmers in the 1980’s to Tim’s thinking. Nichols hated banks, floated around the Michigan militia movement. With his lone wolf, road warrior lifestyle McVeigh rarely came out from under the mushroom cloud of conspiracy theories, second amendment fanatics, and gun show radicals.

Toobin shows, in a neat twist, how the early response to the Murrah Building bombing focused on Muslims, on foreigners who wanted to do harm to the Great Satan. But no. Instead this bomb made of fertilizer and racing fuel in 55 gallon drums all packed tight in a rental truck came from the same source as those who blamed the attack on outsiders.

As my brother said in an e-mail, reconciling the Trumpists with the rest of our nation will be difficult. Make no mistake. Trump is only a highly visible manifestation of the same mushroom cloud of lies and hate that engulfed Timothy McVeigh over thirty years ago. And the bomb that made that cloud became real in a fantasy world already well inhabited by the heirs of the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, and the NRA.

 

Dogs, Politics, US History

Not anymore

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Lughnasa and the Herme Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Leo. Luke and Tal, off camping. Magic the Gathering. My son. Seoah. Murdoch. Jeffrey Toobin’s Homegrown. The Far Right. Freedom. Liberty. Regime Change by Patrick Deneen. Reading.  Celt and Sorsha. Scot and Morgana. Tira and Tully. Orion and Tor. Vega and Rigel. The Wolfhounds. Iris and Bucky. Bridget and Emma. Hilo and Kona. The Whippets. Gertie, the German Wirehair. Kep, the Akita. All of blessed memory. Kate, always Kate. Jon, a memory.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Dogs

One brief shining: Leo’s long tan body lies stretched out on my green rug his dad gone camping last night he barked, an alarm bark, three different times though he is a quiet dog jarring me awake fumbling for my tac flashlight with which I check for Bears or Mountain Lions before letting any dog outside on the Mountain.

 

Luke called yesterday morning to ask if I could take Leo for the weekend. Tal invited him to go camping. Checked my calendar. Sure. I’ll bring him by this afternoon. OK.

That’s why around 11 pm last night I put on my Acorns, got out of bed, and found the strong flashlight. Leo was at the basement door, alert, looking out with that eager, oh my god oh my god look dogs get when something fascinating has roused them from sleep. After sweeping the yard with my flashlight, I let him out. He went into the yard, sniffed, turned around and came back in. Gone, whatever it was. We both returned to sleep.

Always good. Leo. Dogwatching.

 

Got Jeffrey Toobin’s new book, Homegrown, a couple of days ago. Though I’m liking the History of the Two Koreas and about half through it, I’ve set it aside while I read this account of Timothy McVeigh’s life and terror and his influence on the current far right. This topic has me riveted. The more I learn about it the more I see it as a slow motion train wreck, one engine burning hate and fear and distorted notions of freedom and liberty, the other consuming ordinary dreams of an ordinary democracy in an extraordinary and deeply flawed nation. Guess which engine’s moving faster.

Going at a problem at its roots. Radicals. That’s what we’ve tried to do. Those of us drawn to the extreme edge of political thought and action. For me: capitalism, oppression by dint of skin color and economic status, nationality, religious affiliation. For them: freedom defined by gun ownership, liberty defined by that yellow Gadsen flag, and the loss of unearned privilege seen as a Fisher King wound. We both looked back to the founding documents, to the willingness of early white settlers to take up arms against their government in the name of freedom and liberty. We both found that line in the Declaration of Independence: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” We both found energy in the revolutionary spirit of those times, its apparent idealism and the sacrifices made to break away from a perceived tyrant.

Over the years since the heady days of the 1960’s I’ve had to polish off the rough edges of my thought, take it down a notch or two as negotiators like to say, not be so certain of my righteousness, or so correct in my solutions. It just occurred to me that could be a signal as to how this all may play out if we keep our heads, insist on the rule of law, don’t demonize the far right but let them see gradually the need to polish off the rough edges of their thought.

We might end up with a society energized by those who insist on the individual as the atomic weight of our nation, 1, and others who insist on its atomic weight as equivalent to the whole of our population. The resonance between these two inflections could protect liberty and freedom for each of us while seeing to the welfare of us all.

As an old radical, I still yearn for a socialist America where each contributes to his/her/their ability and each receives according to their need. For an America where individuals are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. (MLK) Where my religious freedom ends where yours begins. Where we follow that French gift and its famous poem declaring us willing, even eager to accept your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free as a key component of our national character. That’s still my dream. And I’m still willing to fight for it. But not at the expense of our nation. No, not anymore.

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Judaism, Memories, Minnesota, Mussar

Old skills

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Lughnasa and the Herme Moon

Friday gratefuls: Janet. Her name is Janet. Mussar. Leading a discussion. Metaphor and the sacred. Thinking. Feeling. Lev. Luke and Ann. Ian. Carol. Gracie and Leo. Sarah and Elizabeth. Judaism. Reconstructionist. Finding religion again with no reservations. Hallelujah. Conversion in Jerusalem. Prostate Cancer. Irv. Marilyn now home. Tara in Europe. The Trail to Cold Mountain. Final edits. Now it’s a script for me to learn.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Leading

One brief shining: In a far away state at a time now long ago I used to sit down often at a table or stand in front of a room knowing my job was to take a conversation with those present through difficult terrain, perhaps deciding how to take on unemployment or a recalcitrant landlord or an obdurate city hall or one of the many corporations that wanted to reach into people’s lives and take away their agency, then make a turn from conversation to action. Oh how I loved it.

 

Yesterday for an hour and a half. I led the mussar group through the most difficult terrain of all, those things that matter to our interior, to our souls. I’d forgotten how satisfying it is to do that. I avoid leadership roles these days. Saying no rather than yes. Saying been there. But as a substitute for the Rabbi. A one time thing. I said yes.

I miss it. Reading the pulse of a group, guiding in a gentle way or a forceful way depending on the need of the moment, offering my own thoughts lightly or not at all or for the purpose of digging further into the topic. Yesterday’s topic was the purpose of metaphor and the application of that purpose to language we use about God. Also, strangely and powerfully, the question: What is God for? A lot to be said on this. We spent a fun hour and half doing just that.

Perhaps I could find these moments a bit more often. I don’t want to chair a committee. Nope. But I sure did enjoy the time yesterday. Though. I did fuzz up Janet’s name. Conflated her with Marilyn who sat beside her. Because the group has three Marilyns and Janet’s name, for some reason, skipped my mind. Don’t you love that phrase, skipped my mind? Janet danced away from available attention, played hopscotch in another corner just out of reach.

She came up to me afterwards and said, “My name is Janet, Charlie.” Oh. Oops. Ian, a visitor from California gave me a fist bump.  He’s my age. Luke came up and gave me a big hug. There was a buzz in the room, the conversation spilling over past the end of the meeting.

On my way out to the car Ginny came up to me and asked if I was converting. Yes, I said. Could I talk to you about it sometime? Ginny’s an Arkansas farm girl turned opera singer then stage actor then nurse. I told her I’d love to. Maybe the Blackbird? Which is in Kittredge where she lives with her partner.

Politics, Science, Weather +Climate

Under the Mushroom Cloud

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Lughnasa and the Herme Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Oppenheimer, the movie. Gabe. The last revision of The Trail to Cold Mountain. Acting. Cool night. Closed caption contraption. In and Out. Euphemisms. Driving. In rush hour. On I-70. With the express lanes functioning. God is Here, the book. Metaphors. For the sacred. Mussar. Leading mussar today. Getting back into the Mountains after having been in the city.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Movies

One brief shining: Trinity on the White Sands of New Mexico, a tower alone, an old fashioned motor and chain lifted a ball with electrical wires coming off of it, like a head connected to a neural mapping device, only this was no head, rather it was the first atomic bomb moving slowly link by link to its moment of explosive truth.

 

Baby boomer? Yes. They’re talking about my generation. A massive number of births following a long and bloody war. Which, at its end, changed the world forever. The movie Oppenheimer gives us a glimpse into the work, the pragmatic scientific bloody-minded work, that made that change. It shows us, yes, the story of the Chief Executive Scientist behind the bomb’s completion, Robert Oppenheimer. A complex man filled with paradox and living a life always on the knife edge of tragedy. Yes, an American Prometheus chained ever after to the rock of fame and infamy, governmental vultures stopping by to pick at his liver, healing up and then starting over again.

What it does not show is the mushroom cloud hovering over us baby boomers, the first generation to grow up with the knowledge that humanity held the awful power to eliminate itself. An anti-evolutionary device, the A-bomb. Too easy but I’ll say it anyway. Our sword of Damocles. Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD. ness. What else can it be?

Under the mushroom cloud spies snuck here and there, covertly hunting for nuclear secrets. The US and the Soviet Union locked in a standoff made Velveteen Rabbit by the missile silos in Siberia and in the fields of Wyoming and South Dakota. That same mushroom cloud hovers still. Only now the so-called nuclear club has many members: China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Israel, the U.S, North Korea, France, the United Kingdom.

Ironic that in the early winter of the baby boomer generation the great threat to the world is no longer that mushroom cloud but an early industrial age blanket made of carbon. Not to say the nuclear threat does not remain. It does. Yet so far the MAD notion of self-destruction in an instant has held fingers away from the buttons.

All the while we drove our cars, buses, trucks and turned on our air-conditioners, joined the electric revolution.

Apocalypse now is not a movie anymore.

Acting, Politics, US History, Writing

Unforgivable

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Lughnasa and the Herme Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Acting class. Abby. Joan. Rebecca. Tal. Deb. Voices. Haunting voices. Dreams. Hail. Rain. Thunder. Lightning. Acting. The Trail to Cold Mountain. Almost finished as a script. Cool mornings. Good sleeping. A drive back in a Rain soaked Night. Again.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Feelings

One brief shining: Last night a cool breeze came off Berrigan Mountain making the synagogue’s social hall comfortable while I shuffled my pages of The Trail to Cold Mountain and raised the music stand a bit.

 

Most scripts are collaborative, Tal said. The playwright gives them to a director and a group of actors. Everybody has their say. I like that. I enjoyed writing this script. It felt natural to me. Might try a different idea. As well as a new novel.

I know there is a certain amount of avoidance involved in starting a new novel while I have others at important stages of revision or with a few thousand words left to complete a first draft. Well, maybe more than a certain amount.

However, it’s the act of writing (like I’m doing right now) that excites me, turns me on, and the rush of a new idea, or a new form? Wow. And since, for some reason, I don’t care about readers, or at least not enough to become skilled at marketing my work, why not go with the journey?

 

Going to see Oppenheimer in about 45 minutes with Gabe. I found my copy of Oppenheimer: American Prometheus yesterday and brought it downstairs. I want to read it. Probably later in the fall. This is the book underlying the movie.

Can you imagine having Nagasaki and Hiroshima on your heart? I can’t.

Been reading in the Korean histories about the nuclear frisson there. How South Korea wanted the bomb but the U.S. walked them back from it. And, how an unfortunate series of preventable events led North Korea to pursue it. The whole rogue state thing was unnecessary. Could have been different.

 

The big one has landed. Trump’s indictment in January 6th. Here’s a line from a fascinating Atlantic piece about it: “Enough of all this; we can love our friends and our family and our neighbors without accepting their terms of debate. To support Trump is to support sedition and violence, and we must be willing to speak this truth not only to power but to our fellow citizens.”  This is it.

All else pales before a President who commits high crimes and misdemeanors. I agree. The rest is awful and unforgivable. Classified documents. Financial and sexual abuse of one sort and another. Yes, a despicable person. Sure. But for a President to act against the nation which elected him? A firing offense. Of course. But also a disqualifying one for future office.

Of course. Innocent until proven guilty. Yet. We all know. Even, perhaps especially his followers and sycophants know. This man wanted to upend the peaceful transfer of power after a national election. That’s as far away from ok as a defrocked pedophilic priest saying the mass.

Acting, Feelings, Judaism, Politics, Writing

Chesed and The Emotive Presidency

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Lughnasa and the Herme Full Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Gabe coming up today. We’ll see Oppenheimer together tomorrow. (He said he was going to wear a suit.) Prolia. Bone density. Resistance work. 2 hour workout yesterday. Ann. Her good work on The Trail to Cold Mountain. Zoom. Skype. Pixels. Computer GPUs. CPUs. Screens. Keyboards. ChabotGPT4. AI. Skynet. The Internet. Laptop. Desktop. Tablet. Smartphones. Our world of small miracles. The James Webb. Starlink. The Book. The Chair. Vision.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Internet

One brief shining: “Charlie,” the woman in the blue coat called through a cracked door so I got up and went to her; she had her left leg wrapped in blue with an orthopedic black boot up to the calf  and resting on one of those little scooters you see every once in a while now; her name was Carol it said on her blue coat, “Sit here,” I did and she placed a small tray with a syringe near me, had me turn to face the wall since the Prolia shot goes in the back of the arm, she stuck me, I said thank you, and left.

 

I mention Carol because her demeanor was so calming and warm. An instant connection. This woman cares. I could feel it. Kindness came off her in waves. Due to my delicate condition I see lots of medical professionals over the weeks and months. Few of them are robotic or uncaring, but many, most of them are hurried. And I know why. The era of corporate medicine times “patient encounters” and the ability to upcode. A patient’s feelings or the end result of a visit are not part of the metrics. In spite of those cute little surveys sent out after each encounter. Be ye not fooled. They are not striving to improve their service though they may be trying to improve how you evaluated your visit. Not. The. Same. Thing.

 

Fell back asleep this morning. Happens some times. Up at 8:30! Oh, my. I chuckled at myself. Today is Trail to Cold Mountain day. Editing the script, refreshing memory, going one page deeper into memorization. Acting class tonight.

Gabe’s visit will include Oppenheimer tomorrow. Looking forward to having him here. I need to see these kids more often. Not sure how to do that. Their lives are busy now and I can no longer hop in the car to go see them without losing a day after to recovery from the drive. A conundrum.

 

Let the silly season be seen as well underway. A NYT article reports Trump and Biden tied in a hypothetical rematch. Not sure I can stomach much more of this. Already. And we’re a year plus away from the voting. How he wrote wonderingly can this be? A man with indictments already in two investigations and other indictments likely in two others against a man whose performance in office has not been flashy, but has been much, much better than I anticipated. And in the midst of genuine crisis after crisis. Covid. The Ukraine. Inflation. The economy post Covid. We are well and truly divided.

Read this George Will column for a cogent explanation as to why this upcoming election may be so painful. Here’s a quote from it: “In a National Affairs essay with that title [The Emotive Presidency], Mikael Good, a Georgetown University political theory student, and Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argue that “Trump’s masterstroke” was to realize that, for his core supporters, his governing is of secondary importance.”