not a movie review...

     Tron was bad, and not that Ed Wood 'The future is where we will spend the rest of our lives' bad either...it ripped off The Dark Knight, The Matrix, and, yes, the Bourne movies, right down to the score (a combination of DK and Bourne), and the obviously Bourned final title sequence.  And, and, it offers half-baked Zen plus some pop-hegalian theodicy...then there's the occasional appearance of The Dude...fascinating as pop artifact, terrible as a film...more to come...

Dostoevsky called...

     ...and he would like the royalties for this story sent to his address in Roulettenburg...

well said...

     '[W]e speak as though Christ is a poem about lambs and cornerstones, not that cornerstones and lambs are poems about Christ. We gives lambs and cornerstones a corner on reality that we say Christ cannot have.'

odds and ends...

     So I just love making diatonic triads, and I'm obsessed with 9/8 time with a swing feel.  Don't know what's come over me...
*****
     You say you want a revolution?  There's a gift card for that.
*****
     Hegel called over the weekend to apologize.  I was gracious and magnanimous all at the same time.
*****
     Looking at my bookshelves I realize, I just can't quit the Russians.
*****
     Snow on the ground outside my window - the work season has officially ended.  It's time to play - literally, since I'm buying a new used acoustic guitar today.
*****
     Oh, yeah, peace out...    

i thought i'd whine a little...

    Nothing happened this morning, nothing at all.  It's just, well, I was so bored.  I miss the cycle of festivals - the church has her own time you know - and I miss liturgy.  To be sure, there are no drums in the sanctuary, and the gaggle is ordered and solemn and not at all superficial.  No, it's me - I feel - and in saying this I make no large claims for anyone else - I feel cut off from the Church. 
     That's my problem, yes, and it's far from a new problem to be sure, and there is no solution ready to hand I dare say...and yet, yet, I was bored, soooo very booored.  The sermon was damn fine, the folks were friendly, there was decency, good order, and suchlikethatthere...and I was soooo boooooooored.  In fact, 'boredom' doesn't quite say all - ennui, that's better - ennui, that French mashup of boredom and existential emptiness. 
     Oh, and no matter how hard I try, I just can't bring myself to think that these fine folks are right about the Eucharist and baptism...close they are, but not quite there - devout all the same, which makes it hard, but still wrong wrong wrong...  And yet I really love 'em.  Go figure...

a poem...

            ...and where were you
I'd like to know – don't tell me that
you didn't know the hour,
don't say you've been here all along -

there, go ahead now, tell
me where you've been – it's been a long
night you know – you might
have called or sent a line or –

I’m tired from counting
milepost after milepost as they passed me by -
waiting as I sped along
for you to catch me – by the way

I’m well - you didn't ask,
you have your reasons, though – why
won't you please tell me where
you were – it's not like you've seized

the chance to say your say –
silent still? silent as the sea –
fine – have it your way – it's just
that I've waited...

tolstoy again...

     The narrator of War and Peace - none other than Tolstoy himself perhaps? - is capable of subtle irony and humor in the pursuit of moral perception.  One can, of course, offer this passage as an example of the former:

'Since the end of the year 1811 an intense arming and concentration of western European forces had begun, and in the year 1812 those forces - millions of men (including those who transported and fed them) - moved from west to east, to the borders of Russia, towards which, since the year 1811, the forces of Russia had been drawn in exactly the same way.  On the twelfth of June, the forces of western Europe crossed the borders of Russia, and war began - that is, an even took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature' [III.i.1].

Too true, that, but it's also the start of an extended essayistical meditation on necessity and freedom in history.  Note that western and Russian forces seem drawn to the border of Russia like iron filings following a magnet under a piece of paper.  What's more, even, or rather, especially the Great Ones, Napoleon and Alexander, are 'slaves of history', caught in a web of forces set in motion by a million contingent decisions and actions.  So says the narrator - and I think he's on to something.
     Still, I must confess that there are other passages even more biting in their anger-forged irony, while being quite funny if you linger with 'em a moment.  Consider this - there is no need for any context I should think:

'Balaga was a famous troika driver, who had known Dolokhov and Anatole for six years already and furnished them with his troikas....  More than once he had driven Dolokhov, when he had had to elude pursuit; more than once he had taken them for a ride around town with Gypsies and "damsels," as Balaga called them.  More than once, while in their employ, he had run down folk and cabbies in Moscow, and his "gentlemen," as he called them, had always helped him out.  More than once he had been overdriven under them.  More than once he had been beaten by them; more than once they had gotten him drunk on champagne and Medeira, which he liked, and he knew a thing or two about each of them which would have sent an ordinary man to Siberia long ago....  While in their service, he risked his life and his hide twenty times a year, and he had driven more horses to death than they had paid him in roubles.  But he liked them....  He liked giving a painful lash on the neck to a peasant, who even without that was trying, more dead than alive, to get out of his way.  "Real gentlemen!" he thought' [II.v.16].

another poem in progress...

Sonata


Of the spewing forth of words there is no
end, mouth an open grave that swallows
sulfurous dew a woman’s cinnamon-drenched
hair memories of orange groves, pears,
uncertain voices and childish cries, longing
lost under the sun, gravel under foot;
there is no end, o child, o dayspring, judge
of rites and festivals, for our lady hawks
onions by the road, yet o it’s a broad and lovely
road, as broad as pasture overgrown with
nettles, palms, rattlesnakes; look, along
the broad disheveled road at night a burning
cross, a liturgy to a cloaked and boring god;

of the spewing forth of words there is no
end, book after book devoured, tossed
aside while all was green under the sun
of summer after stripping off that cincture, burning
that alb, to skip along free of vestments, water
from a cracking font, to stand no longer
in the fire under the sun, o trial, o burden hard
to bear, at war with my tongue and with my
hands, for all is now and ever shall be,
shall be, as the shattered ‘I’, limestone,
fossil foraminifera, splintered
driftwood on the shore all swirl under the sun
and mock our present; still we remember,
through the ache of parting spouses in a marriage
bed, fire flashing off each face like hard struck
flint, that garden of time wherein we sleep
together:  may we not yet break from nostalgia;

so of the spewing forth of words there is no
end – mouth’s an open grave which swallows
all, tongue’s a weapon of destruction,
but o my heart remember, let the waterfall
with trumpet blast not catch you fast asleep
under the sun–

a poem...

Twilight


Autumn’s hymn falls silent
clouds hide the sun   I may never
recognize the moon if she
shows through again

Curse this muted light   this early
hour   I’d have light diaphanous
as water   each breeze a kiss
no shade   no dark

Still   there is a light
clouds will never hide this hour
Chase o chase that light   the night
has not yet come

acting my age...

     So, it's raining out there.  To be precise, it's pouring out there.  And, and, I just woke myself up at a coffee shop - seems I was snoring.  I leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader....

i've seen this movie as well...

     'About 20 percent of the comets visible from Earth were sent by a dark, distant planet'...do you think they know how that sounds?

can they get an amen...

     My friends, we here at ER have made our objections to that horrible Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer song and TV show quite clear.  Well, in that spirit, I offer you Cracked.com's fine article on The Wizard of Oz, one of the most depraved movies ever made.  Truly, it's wicked - no one should allow their children to watch it.

no one should ever ask me anything...

     A fellow at work wants to be a poet.  This came as a surprise to me, for he has always seemed such a sensible sort.  Anyway, he knows I write poems, so he asks, 'How do you know you're a poet?'  Well, that's a good question.  'Because I write poems', I replied.  Then I ask, 'Do you write poems?'  'No', he says, 'but I really want to'.  'Well, until you start writing poems you aren't a poet'.  'So, all I have to do is start writing poems?' he asks.  'Yes.  But be careful - not all who think they're writing poems are writing poems'.  'But if it looks like a poem, I mean, if it's got rhymes and all, isn't it a poem?'  'Not always.'  'Then how will I know if I am really writing poems?'  'By writing poems'.  'This is confusing', he says finally. 
     Yes, yes it is...

of course...

     ...laughter is quite compatible with sadness.

a fine post i wish i'd written...

     I found this beautiful and true in most every respect.  Now, I undermined it all when I laughed out loud just once: 'Why are clowns so frightening? Their demonic aura comes from the fact that they never stop smiling. Hell is the country of clowns, where tormented strangers smile at one another compulsively and forever.'  It's not that I'm large, and thus contain multitudes.  I aspire to serve the hobgoblin of little minds.  No, it's just funny because it's true.

a thanksgiving offering...even for those who don't do 'thanksgiving'...

     I give you 'Cotton Tail' from the Buddy Rich Memorial Concert of 2008 with Neil Peart.

take and read he said...

     A friend sent me Inside Beethoven's Quartets:  History, Performance, Interpretation, by Lewis Lockwood et al.  Since Beethoven's string quartets are amongst my Favorite Things, I'm giddy at receiving such a gift.  It includes a helpful CD.  I need it, as I can't sight-read a score, annotated or otherwise.  Yes, I really should learn some music theory...

from the old endlessly rocking...

     Been thinking that it may not be worth it to keep this new site going:  i don't know, i just don't know...

it's beginning to look a lot like Advent...

     Of course the stores put out their Advent displays way too early - I mean, we aren't even out of Ordinary Time. O well. I could complain all day about the commercialization of Advent, but that would dilute my happy sense of anticipation.

reflections on 9/11...

     '9/11' - the mere mention of it trumps all reason. A mixture of fear and sentimentality prevails over any fact on the ground. The date itself has acquired an apocalyptic significance. Just what the events of that day reveal, beyond the horror of utopian fantasies and the predictability of evil, is anybody's guess.  Pay that no never mind - we can justify any war, any act of torture by the mere mention of 9/11.  Speak that magic incantation, and people will surrender all their liberties, degrade themselves, and buy anything that seems to offer safety. 
     The events of that day have indeed left us traumatized, but not because of the obvious outrage of the attacks themselves.  No, once again, our putative innocence was lost; once again, we were brought face to face with history, that inescapable saeculum we all share.  For America, history is the temporal realm of The Fall, and by definition the US is such a novum, its founding such an eschatological watershed ushering in a New World Order no less, that anything that reminds us that we are, you know, folks emmeshed in fallen history and subject to all its shocks and terrors, seems to cause what I can only call a collective fugue state.  That the attacks of 9/11 were the climactic acts of an enemy with whom we had been at war for nearly a decade; that the attackers were helped by insiders who brought the weapons aboard ahead of time; that the attack was the result, not of a failure of airport security, but of incompetence and a criminal lack of cooperation amongst the CIA, NSA, and the FBI; all of that gets lost in a fog of sentiment.  We surround the sites of our trauma with shrines of kitsch, and stifle all argument with manipulative, and tearful, recollections of the victims.  Just so we conspire to hide the hard meaninglessness of that day's violence.
     The violence of 9/11 was, and is, an outrage.  It should not have happened.  Those who took those planes and flew 'em into those buildings committed great evils.  Thousands died simply to satisfy the fantasies of a group of well-funded, uselessly intelligent nihilists.  It was in fact a skirmish of sorts in a global war that started years before and that has cost millions of lives in Africa and Asia, a war that has seen millions of others enslaved by a new wave of fascist nihilism that is all the more virulent than that of the 20th century for being decentralized and mobile.  Given the scope and persistence of that war - which ramifies throughout Oceania, Asia, Africa, and perhaps even Mexico with it's current war - that there has not been a repeat of 9/11 on these shores is likely due to thousands of hours of painstaking work by wonkish analysts and spies and the like, and for that we should be grateful.
     All the same, we cannot pretend any longer, if we ever could, that we are exempt from history's terrors.  That isn't a reason for resignation or timidity, but a summons to risk and bold action in the name of the Good, knowing that all things in this world will end, and that we can only do many goods in approximation and yearning for that Good.  We must, finally, remember that history is the theater, if you will, wherein God accomplished all that was necessary for us and for our salvation.  We have nothing to fear from fallen history, or from the repetitive emptiness of evil, for he brought all newness in bringing himself.
     So, forget the false eschatology of the American Myth, put aside the kitsch and the shrines and the dreams of safety, and look the enemy in the eye, facing the uncomfortable truth that we both inhabit a small planet emmeshed in a common history.  And above all, don't be afraid.
     Peace out.
   

news to me...

     The already cool opening to Pink Floyd's 'Money' is even cooler when you realize it's in 7/4, and you start feeling and counting all at the same time.  I'm sure everyone else caught that a long time ago, but I've shamefully neglected music theory and the technicalities of time...

AAAAARRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!!

     Good God, the 'Christmas Songs' are here!  Make 'em stop!  I don't want to pretend a Snowman is Parson Brown!  'And don't forget to hang up your sock' - don't play that song! in the name of all that's good and holy don't do it!  Thanksgiving ain't even here, and I've had to endure the ringing of Sleigh Bells in a Land That Is Glistening...the torment! the emptiness!  For the love of...God...save us...

can i put this on my resume?

     So, it seems I've balanced the budget.  I wonder - if I ran for office on such a collection of taxes and spending cuts, would I get shot the day after I started the campaign, or the day before the primary?  'Tis a poser, my friends...

an update...

     Made some changes to the poem below. 

plus la change...keep the change...it's all the same...

     Work has slowed to the point that I can often get home before nine in the evening.  That doesn't mean the season is officially over - I signed a new customer last night, and have several contracts to close before the end of November.  Still, the end is near, my rest is at hand. 
     Didn't have the best year; at least, I didn't have the year I wanted.  Around the middle of the summer, I took several blows that nearly undid me, from stunning denials by insurance adjusters, to customers who backed out of agreements without so much as pretending to have a conscience.  It all brought your humble narrator quite low, and had me noodling over quitting yet again.  Surely, surely, my instinct told me, there must be something better.
     I didn't quit.  In fact, after losing so many battles in the middle of the season; after getting beat to hell; after falling to the bottom third of sales reps company wide; after all that, I say, it has all turned out all right somehow...somehow, again let me say, somehow, because don't know how or why it has all worked out all right.  I just know it has.  I've come from near the bottom to right around fourth place, with third in view.  Now, I wanted to be number one my friends, but no, I apparently needed humility.  Well, I don't know if I feel humble - in fact, I doubt that has anything to do with humility.  I do know that I've been brought low, and then allowed to get back up.
     In short, this is nothing new at all, nothing spectacular.  Grace inscrutable and incalculable saved me once again from disaster.  And that, dear reader, is nothing new either - so it is with all of you, with all that is but would cease to be without that act of being that is at once gratuitous and expressive of the nature of God as one who diffuses goodness, beauty and truth in the very act of making and sustaining all that is seen and unseen. 
     For me, the least important person in the whole story, all this is a gift - I get to earn a living, working honestly for my customers.  There's nothing spectacular, nothing particularly interesting about it.  What's more, it could be taken away at any moment.  As I consider the careening stupidity of leaders elected and otherwise, which stupidity pales compared to my own, I realize more and more how powerless I am over anything out there.  All I can do is show up every day and do my job.  The wider world will have to take care of itself...or, rather, it is taken care of, so I needn't worry about it.
     Peace out.

a calm reflection on recent actions by the federal reserve...

     You know, as I ponder the new Fed policy of 'Quantitative Easing', or QE3 for cuteness, many questions come to mind, like 'How much will the silverware fetch on the black market', and, 'Does cat *really* taste like chicken'. These are good times, my friends, good times...

still work to be done...

This roof is steeper than it looks my friends...

a happy poem...

Wherein We Prepare for Another Apocalypse

O for God’s sake, what have I to do
with congresses or congresses with me –
for my house, if it’s all the same to you,
we’ll take our books, and perhaps our pets, and flee
to the hills before the parties all agree
it’s better to clean the rolls and start anew.
I fear those who hope, on bended knee,
to reap an Eden sopped with morning dew.
Call it, year zero for the happy few:
against this dream how can we hold a plea –
the merely human’s worth less than a flea
when utopia calls; and let’s admit we knew
all along that there could be no place
in that nice world for such a fragile race.

done some decorating...

     As you can see, I've a tentative look to the new place.  I also have this nifty blog roll to your right.  You'll notice, probably, some new folks about, and lament with me the inevitably absent - many of the links in my other blog roll were defunct, and so were not transferred.  Of course, this is a work in progress, so if a favored blog ain't there, it just might appear in the next few days.

just noodling here...

     What of my identity, that continuity over time that should help define me?  I don't know that it exists, at least not in any way we comfortably imagine.  In Him, dear reader, we each have our continuity over time - for really now, this present moment that I inhabit, what is it but a vapor? are we substantial left to ourselves? what are we, what is this 'self', in any event?  No, only in Him do we move and have our being - our existence is, truly, none of our doing, but so too our essence...this by the bye is as true for those who deny him as for those who have been taken up into his communion through baptism.  There's only one difference, and it's all the difference...

been reading Tolstoy...

     Why did Pierre get married?  Why did he fight a duel?  And why, after all that, does he grant his wife power of attorney over most of his fortune?  Who the hell knows?
     Consider - how could Andrei change so much?  He is wounded, falls back, and sees the sky:  'How is it that I've never seen this lofty sky before?  And how happy I am that I've finally come to know it.  Yes! everything is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky.  There is nothing, nothing except that.  But there is not even that, there is nothing except silence, tranquillity.  And thank God!...'  Even Napoleon, Andrei's hero, seems '...such a small, insignificant man compared with what was now happening between his soul and this lofty, infinite sky with clouds racing across it'.  Indeed, in Andrei's vision, Napoleon appears '...with his indifferent, limited gaze, happy in the unhappiness of others...', and this disturbs Andrei's peaceful communion with the lofty, infinite sky.  How is it possible that a young man of firm convictions will change so because he sees the sky above him on a battlefield he hoped would be the stage of his triumph? 
     Then there's Sonya and young Rostov...one could, of course, get lost in it all.  Still, still, the question remains - why does any of this happen?  What moves these people?  Folks often grow impatient here and try to find a simple 'motive'.  They inevitably fail, and then castigate Tolstoy - he's a terrible novelist, you know, because his characters aren't 'rounded', 'believable', 'understandable'...but this is in fact one sign of his genius.  The fact is, most of us make the most dramatic, momentous decisions for practically no reason at all.  Most of our 'reasons' are made up later to justify, or judge, what we've done or left undone. 
     Think of the suicide - how we wring our hands, searching for a reason!  We are agape at the horror of it all.  Why would he do that?  He seemed so happy!  A man just doesn't pay his bills, kiss his wife goodbye of a perfectly ordinary morning, purchase tickets for a cruise, then drive to a park and shoot himself.  No no, there would be signs, and we only need learn the key to deciphering 'em.  The sad fact is, there are rarely signs we can so read, even with much practice.  Sometimes, like Anna, people just kill themselves.  It's the conclusion of a train of thought that's not so much a syllogism as a fugue.
     We are a mystery to ourselves, to one another, and this mystery is not less intractable for being such a scandal.  There is only One who plumbs that mystery, One who is Mystery itself.  We know this in part because he became man...riddle me that, my friends, riddle me that...
     Peace out. 
   

what to expect from the new endlessly rocking...

     To all who have arrived from the Original Endlessly Rocking, welcome, welcome.... 
     So, what can you expect around here?  I don't want to say - too much of a commitment don't you know.  All I know is that from time to time you will find a post about, say, poetry, theology, the novel, history...so yes, it's way, way different from the first one...

this is so weird...

     As you can see, I've decided to move Endlessly Rocking from the soon to be demolished Blog-City to this here Blogspot site.  Don't know how long this will last.  I only know that I enjoy writing the occasional essay, poem, rant, and suchlikethatthere.  It will take some getting used to the new place, but I'm happy to give it a try.
     Peace out.

so how does this thing work?

     This is merely a test of the new blog.  Don't know how it will look - don't have anything set up.  This is only a test.