'Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking...'

Thursday, June 27, 2013

two poems...

Fortunate Fall 


It seems a memory, not fit to amuse
     us, when we need a means to slip away
     into a dream of all the good we may
or may not dare. For we yet hate to lose,
shambling and resentful of the news
     that loss is woven into every play
     we make. The sun yet burns us, as we weigh
the odds that love’s an everlasting ruse.

It's like a dream, this memory undone.
     The hour's not as early as I thought,
     yet I bear the remnant of our love
for a garden City lost, then won -
     a fugitive law presses from above
     that all as one might be more dearly bought.

Proper Foolishness



So we’re yet waiting in a silent hour,
     penned down with our brand of vanity
     into a little space, where we can see
only a hint of sky beyond the power
of hidden men. The promise of the flower
     is enough for now. We can only be.
     It’s true, God never posts a probate fee,
but he just might make a strong man cower.

Listen to the echo now of every fall
     of every one alive, the weal and woe
     of time that is itself the final call
to flee our place of self-made famine, low
     enough that God himself learned how to crawl -
     it’s his delight to charm us from below.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner...

 Damn. 

late night rambling continues...


     There is a Conspiracy - let the reader understand. It's all around us; we live in It, in fact. You might say, we move even and have our very being in this Conspiracy. 
     It's insinuated into every story ever told.
     It's in every true Image ever wrought by the most devout atheist.
     But I can't say more - it's all very difficult to explain. 
     With that, I'm done for a while.
     Be seeing you.

random thoughts...

     My Retreat To Commitment is almost complete. I still need to have a new shower installed, and the WiFi kind of sucks. Still, things aren't so bad around here. 
     The Book of Disquiet is our hermeneutical key.
     We sleep soundly to the white noise of drones in our dreams.
     It's quaint, the way so many think it's time to destroy Capitalism. Capitalism is so nineties. Those who still think we're Capitalists are living in a world of Pure Ideology, much the same way the Missouri Synod continues to uphold the Real Presence as an Ideological Cornerstone. 
     Yes, I managed to mention the Missouri Synod in such a place as this. It's a perfect example of Ideological Agitprop institutionalized and made routine. If you have the True Confession, but it has no effect on life itself, then that True Confession is Pure Ideology that allows the Institution to wheeze along.
     What else is new?

just a thought...

     If you can read Fear and Trembling and then go right to sleep, you're a stone.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

disaster averted...

     You see pictured below a clip that holds all my poems, stories, blog archives, photos, as well as files for my work as a contractor. 
     Last week, I lost the damn thing. It had been a while since I had made a copy, so the latest versions of many poems especially were thus lost. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct them all. I had also written many pages for the new novella, several of which seemed promising to me. Then, of course, you have hundreds of pages of essays and suchlike from ER old and new, all of which would be gone gone gone. 
     None of this, of course, was a tragedy of a world-historical order, but in my little world it was a disaster. 
     After a couple of days of searching here and there, a state of steady, low intensity panic took root. I went about my day, all the while repressing the thought that so much of my work seemed to have vanished forever. 
     Then, yesterday, I stumbled on the clip while going through a box of books. How the thing found its way into the box is a mystery past understanding, but there it was. Needless to say, I was giddy.
     So, again, here it is, the inch and a half long engineering marvel that holds my world as a writer.



     Oh, and yes, I have made several copies.

special announcement...

     I'm apparently addicted to diet Dr Pepper.
     You may now return to your lives.
     Peace out.

Saturday, June 22, 2013

a poem and a painting...


So, a couple of years ago I wrote this poem.

Anniversary



Laughing I grasp familiar grief
as you hold fast; to laugh with me
you hold fast so a rustling leaf
won’t frighten us along this road.
You intimate the light I’d see
as in an image all too brief,
reflected in a mirrored sea.
So long ago, see stars explode –
laughing I hope to find us free
to love even as all comes to grief.

My friend, Kirsten Bowen, was kind enough to take this little lyric and work it into a painting, which now hangs on a wall in Lea Ann’s work room. You can find the words as you get closer to the canvass. 




Thursday, June 20, 2013

a poem...


Rondelet



It’s hard upon the longest day

time to collect some ragged flowers
wait for the wind and dark hail showers;
come, let's collect these ragged flowers,
it’s hard upon the longest day.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

a little armchair geopolitical analysis...

     So, after reading a little, this is what I make of the Syrian war.


     Consider - Russia has contracts to supply various arms to the Syrian government, and intends to honor those contracts. 
     The United States has decided to start sending arms and other support to the various factions fighting the Syrian government in the civil war. Never mind that these various factions are themselves murderous, often mercenary, and given to reigns of terror over populations they subdue. (We shall be especially determined to ignore ties to Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups that hate us.) 
     No, let's look at the diagram for a moment, and ponder the one or two degrees of separation that will keep it from being an outright conflict between Russia (with China?) and the US. 
     Scared yet?
     Well, consider also that the US will be perceived as having chosen to support the Sunnis in a wider Sunni-Shi'ite regional war. (That wider war is already in motion as the fighting spreads to Lebanon. Jordan is next I dare say.) That places the US in a proxy war with Iran and gang as well. Such a proxy war brings the US and Russia even closer to direct confrontation.
     The wild card, of course, is Israel - if they attack Iran, all hell breaks loose. 
     Control of the New Silk Road - thousands of miles of pipelines across central Asia - is at stake as well, so Russia, China, and the US have a stake in the outcome of a wider sectarian war in the region.
     Sigh.
     I have to work now, when I'd much rather stare into space and drink scotch. Pray, my friends, pray harder than you have ever prayed in your lives.
     

Sunday, June 16, 2013

anonymous is at it again...


Somehow I just don't trust these people. Maybe it's the ridiculous Guy Fawkes masks, but no, they just don't seem, well, right. And if we're to 'question all authority', then allow me to ask, why should I listen to Anonymous? Why should I believe 'They' even exist?

a little something in lieu of any thinking of my own...


     'Richard Dawkins clearly does not understand children if he thinks that the childishness of theism makes theism like belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. For Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are adult stories and children do not spontaneously believe in them,' Denys Turner.
    

Thursday, June 13, 2013

so, i've decided to take up reading in my spare time...

     What am I reading of late? Glad you asked.
     Here, in no particular order, is what's around me at this moment.

     Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, and State of Exception, by Giorgio Agamben;
     Brother Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling; The Sickness Unto Death; Either/Or; Papers and Journals: A Selection;
     A Contemporary in Dissent: Johann Georg Hamann as a Radical Enlightener, and Freedom in Response: Lutheran Ethics: Sources and Controversies, by one Oswald Bayer;
     Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn, a collection of essays;
     Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body;
     Volumes 36 & 37 of Luther's Works, which contain, among other works, the Confession Concerning Christ's Supper of 1528, Admonition Concerning the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Our Lord (1530), The Disputation Concerning the Passage, "The Word was Made Flesh" (1539), and 1544's Brief Confession Concerning the Holy Sacrament - all of which prove that the so-called Real Presence was in fact marginal to Luther throughout his entire life;
     Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit;
     Icon as Communion: The Ideals and Compositional Principles of Icon Painting, by George Kordis;
     Plays by Luigi Pirandello, translated by Eric Bentley;
     Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul, J. Louis Martyn;
     Richard B. Hays, The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Scripture
     Briggflats, by Basil Bunting.
     
     And, yeah, I'll have read it all by, oh, next Tuesday, sure...

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

adventure! excitement! bookcases!

     This weekend, we buy bookcases. 
     Yes, it's a thrilling life in these parts. Do try to keep up.

Friday, June 7, 2013

more fun from the calvinist international, this time featuring Peter Leithart...

     This just in - the people at the Council of Nicaea were, get this, people. Who knew? What a revolution is upon us. I should adapt my thinking to the New Irenic Future. 
     See, it turns out that homoousias didn't immediately capture the imaginations of everyone everywhere at all times.
     My world is shattered. 
     Of course, I could take consolation in the fact that in the end, the council did in fact confess that the Son is of one being, essence, etc (homoousias) with the Father, but that would obscure the fact that councils can err, and are fraught with all sorts of human humanness.
     O what will I ever do now? 

a little housekeeping..

     I have added several fine blogs to the Blogroll there to your right. I do hope the five of you who are real people have a look around each of 'em. 
     That is all.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

a poem...

     Way back in January I posed a small poem entitled 'Birth Pangs'. Seems it's a sequence. Here's another movement.
*********

Stripped bare, like tree
limbs in a storm, each
reckons with elements, powers
of the air, as light
as nothingness seems
when it seems most like being.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

elca inanity...

     I see my former denomination, the ELCA (Even Larger Church in America), continues its pathetic dalliance with soft apostasy - it has confected its first 'openly gay' bishop. This is, to be sure, blasphemy of a high order, but those who commit such blasphemy want to be affirmed as pious and good. To this end, they will demand that the laws of God and man bend and break to provide cover for their transgression. 
     They are cowards all.
     They seek an escape under cover of the Law from that existential void where they have only the cold comfort of courage in facing down damnation, if such a thing is real. If it is not, then they have only their acts to define their variously absurd destinies. Either way, there is no cover, no affirmation, no escape from their loneliness. They should either embrace it, or repent of it.
     Like I said, pathetic.

Monday, June 3, 2013

yeah, Luther would sit loose on the Real Presence, sure, no problem...


     The Calvinist International is at it again. Here it is:

      'Instead, “Lutheran” eventually became the trademark of the Gnesio-Lutherans who made their particular emphasis on the real presence in the elements the sin qua non of Lutheran identity. It really had not figured as such in Luther’s most foundational works, and its unwarranted primacy did in part serve to give Lutheranism a sort of clerical and disciplinarian character which was quite inimical to its original theology.'
That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve read on Luther in quite a long time. The Confession Concerning the Lord’s Supper? Not foundational. The Large and Small Catechisms? Fluff.
     I mean, come on - the man who said ‘The Sacrament is the Gospel’, and who refused a union at Marburg over the force of is - as in, this is my body etc. - is not recognizable in this farce.
     Again and again let us say, Leave Martin out of your insanity

not a movie review...

     It astonishes me to see how many people just don't get Now You See Me. It's a damn fine movie. I may have something more to say about it later. In the mean time, go see it. 
     Why are you still here?

Sunday, June 2, 2013

a brief confession for the confused...

     Only an impassible God can help, for only a God without passions can truly be love itself. 
     Imagine a god with passions, who suffers, who lacks, and you imagine a creature; perhaps an interesting creature, but a creature nonetheless. 
     No, God is love, and therefore without passions; without lack; without potential yet unrealized. Thus he creates all that is, seen and unseen, out of nothing at all, for the sheer love of it all. 
     In this he does not risk any loss, for he can know no loss. In this he never waits, never asks permission. He is, all in all, and only thus can he guarantee our freedom, our salvation; only thus can he make good all that we have made so wrong.