(Last year’s Memorial Day piece. This year’s, too.
(for and from ala)
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
Please do not forget anything that you take with you.
—automated announcement, Beijing taxicab
One of the key indicators that I do indeed too often dwell in what William Burroughs identified as “an annex of Hell” is the local radio newsperson. He labors out here in the sticks, in the near-invisible bush leagues, but he is in his heart a Fox person—his station a Fox affiliate. I suppose his way of feeling as One with those far-off Fox mandarins who don’t even know he is alive is to endeavor ebulliently al-ways to out-Fox Fox. Thus, there is nothing too mental to come out of this man’s mouth. Nothing.
This man was on the air the morning that President Obama convened his extraordinary and unprecedented press conference to Stop The Madness. Obama deploying his long-form birth certificate as a sort of seawall, to break the tsunami of maniacal jabberers roiling with Knowledge that Obama is a nefarious foreign-born Manchurian Muslim out to outrage all that is America.
This man’s radio station aired Obama’s “Yes, I Am Not A Not-Person” statement, in its entirety, live. The man himself then returned to the microphone to declaim that Obama had just said things that he had not, in fact, said. Words were put into Obama’s mouth; words were taken out of his mouth. And the sense of all these omissions and commissions was that Questions Still Remained as to whether Obama might not truly be a nefarious foreign-born Manchurian Muslim out to outrage all that is America.
It was a jaw-dropping performance. I mean, mere moments had passed since we’d heard the words from the president himself. All had been recorded; the thing itself was even then available for playback to anyone with access to an intertube. Other tubes already bore transcripts of Obama’s words. Yet this “news”man was boldly, methodically laying a track along which chugged an alternative reality.
There is a piano now, here in the Manor. It arrived this morning. A little Baldwin spinet, birthed in the 1960s. It is a sturdy and game little being. We are learning each other.
There is a great poem by Lew Welch, called “He Thanks His Woodpile.” It goes like this:
The wood of the madrone burns with a flame at once lavender and mossy green, a color you sometimes see in a sari.
Oak burns with a peppery smell.
For a really hot fire, use bark. You can crack your stove with bark.
All winter long I make wood stews:
Poet to stove to woodpile to stove to typewriter. woodpile. stove.
and can’t stop peeking at it! can’t stop opening up the door! can’t stop giggling at it
“Shack Simple”
crazy as Han Shan as Wittgenstein in his German hut, as all the others ever were and are
Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers
who walked away from it, finally, kicked the habit, finally, of Self, of man-hooked Man
Many peculiarities there are, among human religions.
Muslims run from pigs faster than Richard Pryor with his body on fire. Catholics each week munch flesh and guzzle fluids that have been laying around for more than 2000 years. Jews would rather hack off their hands than write out the full name of their god. Scientologists wander the land waving “E-meters” in order to get “clear.” Fundamentalist Protestants believe that their lord spends most of his time peering through a giant celestial telescope to determine whether human penises, vaginas, and sphincters are comporting themselves according to his Rules.
And so on.
Now, down in Georgia, is apparently a-borning a faith that requires adherents to journey out into their yards, and there bark like dogs.
Officers cited a man for violating the county’s daytime noise violation Sunday afternoon after people complained he was cursing and barking like a dog in his yard in the 100 block of Brentwood Drive, Athens-Clarke police said.
The ordinance forbids noise in residential areas that can be heard more than 300 feet away, and the officer noted in the report he marked a distance of 320 feet from the spot where he heard the man, police said.
The 35-year-old man denied that he was yelling, and told the officer some people call him “the holy lamb of God.”
He refused to sign the citation, police said.
Oh well. It could be worse. The world according to David Berkowitz, recall, involved a dog that ordered him to take human life.
I tried to do my best, here in the Manor, to get with the season, in re Passover and Easter.
It’s true that I didn’t splash any lamb’s blood on my door.
But I did purchase and place a new doormat. Upon which Jesus could wipe the blood off his feet, if he happened to drop by.
Not that I expected him. Because I happened to know that Jesus last weekend was wallowing in roll-away-the-stone passion with a Minnesota siren, there in her abode of toast the savior warm, bouncing the bedsprings with thee.
Certainly there is nothing that I could offer him, that she was not then delivering.
I did bake some lamb’s blood. Oozing outta ground lamb, the essential ingredient in kofta, born of the Egyptians—the Passover connection, there—but these days most often munched by mountain-dwelling Afghans, a little sustenance before they commence to race down the hill to scream and shoot at dull-domed Americans, trying to convince them to get the hey out of their “country.”
You can find the recipe for this wonderment, as well as various assorted other Judeo-Christian heresies, beyond the “furthur.”
A Redding, California substitute teacher has pronounced a crusade that will place before California voters a ballot initiative that would require state schools to teach students about Christmas carols, and then order them to either sing or listen to the things.
The teacher’s name—no, this is not a joke—is Merry Susan Hyatt.
Fretting that “we were having Christmas without Jesus,” Hyatt said of her initiative: “this is to make sure that we are allowed to have Christmas carols, and no school board member or principal is going to tell us, ‘no, you may not play ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ in your classroom.”
Hyatt’s initiative would permit heathens to extract their children from these annual assemblages of the Godly. Said outcasts would be provided with an unspecified “appropriate alternative,” one that would hopefully not resemble too much the bastinado or the boot.
Hyatt believes that the failure of state schools to command children to intone “Silent Night” is responsible for schoolyard violence and other upbubblings from Hell.
“The kids don’t have a moral compass,” she said. “It’s not much, but I think it [Christmas carols] would help.”
Hyatt said she’s been surprised at the level of violence in many elementary school classrooms where she has taught, and she believes it’s because Jesus isn’t present in Christmas celebrations.
“You have to invite Jesus to have him work in your life,” she said, adding that if you have a Christmas party without Jesus, he won’t help. “He’s the prince of peace; he’s the only one who can get these kids to stop being so violent.”
Hyatt contends that once students are required to repeatedly recite “Good King Wenceslas,” then Good will reign.
“These kids, they need it,” she said. “They need to see that we believe in Jesus, and he is the Prince of Peace. That’s why we are the best country on Earth.”
At first I considered circulating a competing ballot initiative that would similarly require schoolchildren to sing such alternative Christmas carols as “Hark, Hear Shakti’s Bells They Ring,” “Good King Vlad The Impaler,” “Santeria Night,” “We Three Bodhisattvas Of Orient Are,” “Oh Come Allah’s Faithful,” “Carol of the Baal,” “Good Pagan Women Rejoice,” “What Cthulhu Is This,” “Thor Rest Ye Merry Mayhem Men,” “O Hopi Night,” and “He Came Across To Moses Quite Clear.”
Then I realized that it would be of greater benefit to such children, their parents, their heirs, and to all on earth, as it is in heaven, if, before leaving high school, every California child could be enabled to play the song offered below, with equivalent technique, and all the very spirit, heart and soul.
“Profit motive” means very simply: you give less than you take. If you give less than you take, you grow mean and stingy. Everybody suffers. Morality is totally impossible.
—Lew Welch
Fukushima is still leaking and steaming and bubbling and melting, and will be, best guess, for at least another nine months.
And yet, the vultures are already out there, flying high, circling, “eager” to rake in the billions in profit they estimate will come their way, through decades of “cleanup” efforts, transforming the dead zone of Fukushima into a place where human beings may tread without fear that blood will immediately spout from their orifices, or tumors later sprout all over their bodies.
Both companies [Hitachi and Toshiba] have large nuclear-related businesses and appear to be eager to speak about endgame possibilities for a crisis that has heightened global public mistrust of nuclear power. Billions of dollars are likely to be at stake in the cleanup, which could help Hitachi and Toshiba improve their bottom lines.
Making money: I guess I get it. A primitive stage in the development of primates, as they evolve towards beings of light. But aren’t we there yet, to the place where there are at least some limits? Why should people be permitted to get fat off sealing a glow-tomb?
“The answer”—Father Egan was saying—”I think they have it on the prayer wheels. Do you know what it says on the prayer wheels?”
Most of them had gone to sleep. From among the group only the girl with the bandaged arm, the feverish girl and her boyfriend, the dark-bearded young man and the blond giant remained to listen. A few others had gathered around a fire at the base of the overgrown pyramid and were smoking marijuana and passing a bottle of colorless rum. Their laughter sounded a muffled echo off the ancient stone.
“On the prayer wheel it says, ‘The jewel is in the lotus.’ They turn the wheels round hundreds of times a day. The little flags flutter so the wind says it. The Jewel is in the Lotus.”
The feverish girl moaned and stirred in her lover’s arms. Egan stopped speaking and looked at her and saw that she had the dengue. He had had it himself several times. The girl, he thought, was like a lotus and the pain in her overbright eyes a jewel.
(I like occasionally to post here crabby private missives from George Orwell, because they gently amuse me, in a fond sort of way; they humanize him, revealing him to be just another guy grumpy about the cold seeping in through the holes in his socks; they’re not the sort of things people normally associate with the flowings from his pen.
(But I have received complaints about these pieces, from people wondering if Orwell was always an Eeyore, whether he ever once enjoyed anything. And of course he did. Sometimes he even wrote about it. One of my very favorite Orwell essays is the one reprinted here, “Thoughts On The Common Toad,” which appeared first in Tribune on April 12, 1946, and is a very fine paean to the coming of spring, one that could be considered positively rhapsodic.
(It is really spring here now, all of a sudden, in the wake of the 80 days of rain. It took me by surprise, it took me hard. So I am offering up now the spring Orwell, illustrated with some says-spring-to-me photos I’ve recently found amongst the tubes, and closing with a spring incantation from Van Morrison.)
Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something—some kind of shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature—has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time—at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently well, in the middle of the summer.
At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-colored semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.
“When I was preparing to be whatever it is I’ve become I was sent to work in a hospital. Comfort the dying. I remember the mortuary there—it was very Victorian. Neo-Renaissance. In the foyer there was an inscription in Latin. ‘Let smiles cease,’ it said, ‘let laughter flee. This is the place where the dead help the living.’”
The older man in the group got to his feet muttering.
“Bummer!” he shouted at Egan. His heavy face grew red with anger; he raised cupped hands to amplify his voice, and screamed. “Bummer!”
“I’ll describe a picture to you,” Egan told his congregation. “I’m sure you’re familiar with it. A group of men are standing over a pile of corpses. They’re smiling and they have guns. Some of them have tied handkerchiefs across their faces but not to give themselves the raffish air of banditti—because of the smell.”
The priest wiped his mouth with his sleeve and took a cautious step forward. “That’s the big picture, children. That’s how it is now. That’s why you see that picture every week in all the magazines. You know—there are variations, the people, and the uniforms come in different colors, but it’s always the same picture.”
Around them the silences and the darkness deepened. Ramon nuts pattered to the ground through a web of leafy branches, making a sound like soft rain.
“Now why,” Egan asked, “are we made to see this picture week after week until it’s imprinted on the backs of our eyes and we have it before us dreaming and waking?”
No one answered him.
“Will these dead help the living?” he asked. “Are we to seek the living among the dead? What does it mean?”
In the night, They took an hour away. One minute it was 1:59 a.m. and the next it was 3:00 a.m. An entire hour, snatched right off the clock; spirited away to who knows where.
Why? Why did they do this? Why did they take this hour? What did they do with it? Where has it gone? Is it alright there, wherever it is? Is it lonely? Is it sad? Is it staying warm, getting enough to eat? Will it ever come back? And will we still be here, when it does? If we are, will we recognize it? Will it recognize us?
Sandy Denny wrote “Who Knows Where The Time Goes” so we wouldn’t worry so much about such things. She was 19 when she wrote it. She didn’t have a lot of time left herself, then. Although she didn’t know that at the time. We very rarely do. Denny died at age 31, of a cerebral hemorrhage, after a fall.
Not that she had an easy time of it, when she was here. Her bandmate Richard Thompson described her as “someone who didn’t have any skin. She was so hypersensitive to every little thing in the world. It was as if she lived more vividly than the rest of us.”
“I want to be happy,” Denny once said. “And one day I might reach something a little bit closer to the way I want it to go. But it’s all happening in a very slow way. And if we’ve got time left in this world, you know, perhaps I’ll get there one day.”
Below is “Who Knows Where The Times Goes,” set over images of the people of Oita, Japan, captured by a pair of Britishers from 1992-1995. I couldn’t bring the video across the Maginot Line erected by YouTube. Still, worth the bit of extra time required to click over there, I think.
Christina Taylor Green of Tucson, Arizona, was, according to her uncle, Greg Segalini, “real special and real sweet.” She liked ballet and she liked baseball. She was nine years old.
When just a baby, Christina had been featured in a book called Faces of Hope: Babies Born On 9/11. This was the work of Christina Pisera Naman, whose own child, Trevor, had been born on September 11, 2001.
Wondering why her son had been born on that date, Naman concluded that “babies come when they are supposed to come.” And:
“I began to realize my baby—and all of the ones who joined him being born on that day—had a very special purpose. They were born to provide life, hope and goodness to a world on a day when it needed it most.”
Naman’s book opens with a quote from Carl Sandburg: “A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.” And in her book Naman expresses kind and gentle hopes for the babies pictured therein:
I hope that you find good in all people.
I hope you catch snowflakes on your tongue.
I hope you always have more than you need and share your plenty.
I hope you are someone’s dream come true.
Nissan’s book features 50 babies, one from each of the 50 states, each born on September 11, 2001. Christina Taylor Green, born on that date at 12:50 p.m. local time, represents Maryland.
On Christina’s page in the book, page 42, may be found the following hopes:
I hope you know all the words to the Star Spangled Banner and sing it with your hand over your heart.
The words that must best characterize Christina’s life cannot be those found in “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They are, instead, those words that form the hard core of Oscar and Lucinda, by way of the Book Of Common Prayer:
Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.
Because Christina was interested in politics, you see. She had just been elected to the student council at her school. And a neighbor thought Christina might be interested in meeting her Congressmember, Gabrielle Giffords. Who Saturday was greeting constituents outside a Safeway supermarket, as part of her “Congress on Your Corner” attempts to reach out to the people of her district, who in November narrowly voted to return her to the House of Representatives for a third term.
Though Sarah Palin had brought the full of her Tea Party might against her, targeting Giffords as one of 20 members of the House bullseyed on a map Palin posted to her Facebook page, where they were marked for elimination by way of the crosshairs of a gunsight.
Christina Saturday was eager to go, to meet Congressmember Giffords. For Christina believed in her country, in the possibility of effecting change through it. And so she accompanied her neighbor to Safeway.
Journeying Saturday to Safeway too was a disordered young man who had scrambled in his mind the emanations of Sarah Palin and Ron Paul and Art Bell and the Tea Party and the “constitutionalists,” and who believed that he had been granted thereby a license to kill. And so he set out Saturday for Safeway. To put a bullet through Giffords’ brain.
And when he had done that, he put more bullets into those gathered around Giffords. One of those gathered around Giffords was Christina. And so the assassin shot Christina in the heart. And Christina died.
Cut down, like a flower; she fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.
Christina—her name she shares with Christ, an earlier innocent slain—had recently received First Communion. She will never receive another. Her blood poured forth, her body consumed; still, as ever, still we are not saved.
Aretha Franklin has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Generally, such a diagnosis is not good. Generally, it indicates a fairly fast, in the end agonized, shuffling off this mortal coil.
When it happens—soon, or 100 years from soon—it shall be a strain and a trial and a frightful and fearful thing, her consciousness taking leave of her corporeal container. It shall be a great and unalterable wrong, as is all suffering, as is every death, all proof positive that the mysterious manufacturer bequeathed to us a flawed and capricious, senseless and sad, cruel and lacking, impenetrable puzzle of a world.
But in her singing, through her soul, Aretha Franklin ofttimes raised even Jesus from the dead.
he got up walkin’ like a natural man yes he did
Surely, then, someday, surely every day, he—we—shall do the same for her.
(I am reprinting here this piece, which was originally posted May 17, 2008 to the Great Pumpkin, for several reasons.
(First, because it is increasingly obvious that I am too afflicted with age and ennui and enervation and estrangement to complete any time soon the various pieces I have been working out and working on over the past several weeks.
(Second, because even as I am experiencing Extreme Difficulty in weaning myself from abusing my being nearly every day by exposing myself to the howlers and the shriekers and the ululaters, there in the inner sanctum of divine white privilege, who ceaselessly froth that Barack Obama is not What They Want Him To Be, I find that this piece presciently pointed out, even months before Obama’s ascension to office, that of the two paths currently open to any black man in America—”bargainer” and “challenger”—Obama has always publicly trod the path as “bargainer.” He is now as he always portrayed himself to be.
(Third, as a reminder of just what was said by that “challenger” to whom Obama listened so attentively, most Sundays, for more than 15 years: an indication that, though he manifests as bargainer, in his soul Obama is himself a challenger. And challenging is indeed, I submit, in the main, what he is subtly, covertly, about. Behind, as they say, blue eyes. A subject to which I shall return, at length, once age and ennui and enervation and estrangement are successfully surmounted.
(Finally, not many people read this piece when I posted it the first time. So I figured I’d give not many people the chance to read it here.)
Those conversant with the Tanakh (also known, when shuffled, as the Old Testament) might have expected that a pastor with the name of “Jeremiah” could prove to be something of a human fumarole, expelling harsh and unpalatable truths from the pulpit.
For the original Jeremiah—one of the three major “latter prophets” of Hebrew scripture—was an unrepentant hardcase so given to scalding screeds that his very name has entered the language as a synonym for “one who is pessimistic about the present and foresees a calamitous future.” He has even become a second noun—”jeremiad,” denoting “a prolonged lamentation or complaint,” “a cautionary or angry harangue.”
Below the “furthur” are alternated passages from the Book of Jeremiah with those Fox-propagated clips of the sermons of Jeremiah Wright. After perusing the ceaselessly inflammatory words of Reverend Wright’s namesake, I expect that all those who so piously urged Barack Obama to reject and denounce his pastor’s words, to leave his church, will similarly reject and denounce the words of the prophet Jeremiah, demand that their own pastors vow to forever abstain from quoting his words, and, indeed, swear to work to ensure that the Book of Jeremiah, in its entirety, be stripped from scripture.
Not many people are aware that Eve was not the first mate to Adam.
First Adam got jiggy with the various beasts, birds, and other living things that Yahweh paraded before him. As Robert Graves and Raphael Patai record in Hebrew Myths:
When they passed before him in pairs, male and female, Adam—being already like a twenty-year-old man—felt jealous of their loves, and though he tried copulating with each female in turn, found no satisfaction in the act. He therefore cried: “Every creature but I has a proper mate!”, and prayed God would remedy this injustice.
Yahweh then presented Adam with Lilith, a human female. A being run up from the same sort of dust from which Adam was created. Rather than yanked from Adam’s own flesh as a rib, as was, later, Eve.
Adam, however, proved a boor, and Lilith left him. Graves and Patai recount what happened:
Adam and Lilith never found peace together; for when he wished to lie with her, she took offence at the recumbent posture he demanded. “Why must I lie beneath you?” she asked. “I also was made from dust, and am therefore your equal.” Because Adam tried to compel her obedience by force, Lilith, in a rage, uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air and left him.
As Lilith was not around or involved when Adam and Eve consumed the forbidden fruit, she was not subject to the penalties inflicted by Yahweh upon the rest of the human race: death, the pain of labor, enmity between wo/man and nature. Some say Lilith lives to this day in the Edomite Desert, among satyrs, pelicans, owls, ostriches, arrow-snakes, and unicorns.
I like it when I stumble upon a form of magic that I never even knew existed.
That’s what happened Thursday, as I desultorily flipped through A Book About A Thousand Things, the 1946 magpie’s-nest from George Stimpson that addresses such burning questions as “how do bees hum?” and “does fright cause the guinea fowl’s flesh to turn blue?”
And therein I learned that there is such a thing as a “moonbow.”
Rainbows by moonlight, known as moonbows, are unusual but not rare phenomena. Aristotle referred to lunar bows about twenty-two hundred years ago, and they are well known to scientists, although they are not often observed, chiefly because of the faintness of the light at night. Only under exceptional conditions can the colors of a moonbow be seen. Lunar rainbows are most likely to occur after showers on nights when the moon is bright but not too high in the heavens. Similar lunar bows are periodically visible in the spray of certain waterfalls, such as the Cumberland Falls about eighteen miles southwest of Corbin, Kentucky.
That’s a Cumberland Falls moonbow, of the harvest kind, up yonder. More moonbows beyond the “furthur.”
To the disciples, who are having trouble getting it, Jesus is explaining the nature of the Kingdom, and how to apprehend and enter it.
Jesus said: “Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over all things.”
“If one has knowledge, he receives what is his own, and draws it to himself. Whoever is to have knowledge in this way knows where he comes from, and where he is going.”
“What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it. The Kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”
“When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, then you will enter the Kingdom.”
know he is alive is to endeavor ebulliently al-ways to out-Fox Fox. Thus, there is nothing too mental to come out of this man’s mouth. Nothing.
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