so, that happened...

     I threw my back out on Sunday. How, you ask? Well I'll tell ya - I was pulling weeds when it happened. 

     O, the day was beautiful, cool and breezy it was, out of character for late July. It had been far, far too long since I had tended to the gardens, and they were overrun with nettles and ivy. So, a little weeding seemed the thing to do.

     Damn this pain. Love the pain killers - it's easy to see how folks could become addicted to the things. I won't of course. After all, I have far too many addictions as it is. 

     To sum up, here's the buzz - the back's out, wifi's down, and I'm in bed reading The Spanish Civil War by one Hugh Thomas. It's a damn fine piece of work. Soon, life will once more become a wonderful dream. 
     So annoying it is.

a poem...

Musings at the End

 It’s past time that I found my ancient broom,
 cleaned out all this junk, and swept my cell
 from end to end, an exercise to quell
 my anxious roving round this messy room
 beneath a dark, apocalyptic doom, 
 for I’ve made myself some trouble - hell,
 I wouldn’t be too shocked to hear the knell 
 that signals earth’s one last defiant bloom
 before all creatures find eternal rest
(me too, I hope, for nothing is my own) - 
 and so I tidy up as for a guest
 right royal, with a fickle faith now grown
 old, untended, hardly made to wrest
 good fruit at last from words yet newly sown.

'a million revisions'...

    So, I revised the poem in that last post. The fault was in those last two lines. It also now sports a title, which, while not essential, is often a welcome challenge.
     

On the Lookout for Fall



About the house our summer seems
a riot now of madness, all order
gone in a tangle of vines and nettles 
forcing all to cede their place, 
heat creeping slow, a garden gone
to seed, until the days grow shorter
and the slanting sun in time restores 
to dappled form each dying leaf.

an untitled poem...

About the house late summer seems
a riot now of madness, all order
gone in a tangle of vines and nettles 
forcing all to cede their place, 
heat creeping slow, a garden gone
to seed, until the days grow shorter
and the slanting sun restores 
at last every calm and dappled form.

poetry criticism...

     As usual, there's not a poem in the current Poetry that's worth a damn. For instance, there's a blurb of hideousness entitled 'Age Appropriate'. Here are the first few lines:

Sometimes,
mystified by the behavior
of one of my sons,
my wife will point out
if it's age-appropriate,
making me wonder why
I still shout at ballplayers on TV
and argue with the dead.

It's complete lack of style and grace is a manifestation of its intellectual and emotional banality. The turn implied by 'and argue with the dead' is senselessly appended to add a spectre of depth to the damn thing. And, it's pairing with the clunky 'I still shout at ballplayers on TV' is risible. Who cares why you do anything?
     Nothing more than bad prose chopped at random into lines that run down the page without music, this bland thing is a perfect example of the typical Contemporary Poem In America. All such works deserve their future inevitable oblivion.

something he said...

     The Rev. Soon-to-Be Doctor Tripp Hudgins wrote on Facething: 'The great theological debate of our present time is more fundamental than that. It is about what we do.'

     Yes, the world groans to find itself once again a Pelagian wilderness. In fact, there is no debate my friend - there is good, there is evil, and more and more our fine-tuned options for apparent neutrality are being taken away from us. This not, however, about what we do, but rather about whose we are. Now, that is far from certain in this opaque time if we are left to discern on the basis of what we do. How fortunate then to know that what's been done to us is far more important than what we do - it's crucial in fact. 

     As for me, I'm just a scoundrel who would like to be saved - 'deserve's got nothing to do with it'.

news...

     Time for Nabokov, Vaughan, Keats, Gogol, Cervantes, and assorted Latin poets.

sure, i'll say something about the Zimmerman verdict...

     Allow me to uselessly and presumptuously ramble on the basis of the scant reading I've done to date: 
     First, it's likely that both Martin and Zimmerman were defending themselves. Zimmerman set in motion a series of events that led to a confrontation in which each rightly felt that his life was in danger. This confrontation was neither inevitable, nor necessary. Right up to that fatal moment, Zimmerman could have identified himself and stated his purpose, in which case we might have had a story of a stand off that ended when police arrived to find that Martin was doing nothing wrong, and that Zimmerman was an overzealous fool. (The bulletproof vest etc are giveaways that he likely inflated not only the purpose of the Neighborhood Watch, but his role in it.) 
     Second, Martin isn't a symbol of anything, neither is Zimmerman. This horrible event doesn't tell us anything about race, gun violence, 'Stand Your Ground' laws - it tells us nothing at all about anything at all. It just happened. It was pure absurdity, abetted by idiocy. It's likely, to speculate on the basis of nothing at all, that Zimmerman is in fact guilty of some kind of criminal recklessness, but the idiot prosecutor chose to overcharge and thus lost the whole thing. So there's more stupidity, more idiocy (those are different things). 
     The death of Trevon Martin can only be used to further an agenda - whatever that may be - at the expense of the truth that it is, for all of us outside the circle of family and friends of both men, meaningless. The death of that young man, and the weight of having killed him borne by another, are without purpose, without meaning, without yield for us and our various Causes. Why did it happen? Because it happened. The reality of providence in which I firmly believe does not imply that such events are anything other than absurd acts of stupid fortuity, fortuity aided, yes, by idiocy and misapprehension, but not less but more fortuitous and thus stupid for all that. 
     The real question therefore is, Can we live in a world where things like this just happen? Can we accept moral responsibility for our free acts in such a contingent world? Zimmerman to be sure acted freely, if idiotically. That the Triune God is first and final cause of all that is, does not mitigate but rather establishes this freedom, this existential responsibility. So, rewind that night, and have Zimmerman or Martin do the least little thing differently, and the whole damned tragedy might never have happened. Once again, we see that this tells us nothing about anything other than the often blind contingency of our lives, and our moral responsibility to act accordingly, knowing that foolishly overreaching can yield terrible consequences. 

it's called a bar...

just a thought...

     When someone says that a 'decision' was 'difficult' and 'anguished' it ususally means they did something evil and need to justify it by the profundity of their pain. It's all right to do all manner of evil, you see, if only you can tell a sad story about necessity and your personal struggle. 

     Remember, it's all about you.

criticism...

     I'm not sure that last experiment, a poem consisting of what could be first lines of other poems, really works. 

a poem you've seen before...

First Lines



I don't know what the sea is doing tonight

the Gadarene swine seem to have swarmed into the city

do lilies grow in fields do birds never toil for their keep?

fog rolled over us at breakfast with bourbon outside

bituminous are the rocks at the waters edge

don't look at the sun keep gazing at your shadow

drops dripped branches cracked ice tortured leaves

toil away for the lasting crown as the lilies toil away

never know never what the sea is doing don't look

query...

     Dare I drink another glass of wine?

a poem...

The sequence continues:


O garden veiled 
stone dark with water
a light drizzle shimmering 
sunlight in water - 
the end is not the end
a man fears a veil to no end.

untitled...

     It's been a while since I drank a whole bottle of wine in such a short time. It was damn fine I don't mind saying...

in lieu of anything of my own, here's something about Mary...

     'There is the reality of the icon, which is a picture of some bit of this world, so depicted and so constructed as to open the world to the "energy" of God at work in what is being shown. And, most importantly, there is the person who stands on the frontier between promise and fulfillment, between earth and heaven, between the two Testaments: Mary. That she can be represented in so many ways, thought about and imagined in so many forms, is an indication of how deeply she speaks to us about the hope for the world's transfiguration through Jesus . . . ,' Rowan Williams, Ponder These Things: Praying with Icons of the Virgin, p. xv.

poetry blues...

     So, today I received several emails rejecting poems I had submitted to a few journals. 

     Fuck 'em.

     I like posting my poems here, and sending 'em to friends and family the old fashioned way. 

     It's the seventeenth century all over again for us poets, dear reader. We write our poems, and circulate 'em amongst those we deem fit to receive 'em.

     Now, if only I could find a patron willing to give me a stipend of, say, three grand a week, for which I had to produce the occasional poem for his daughter's graduation or his wife's new pool house. 

     That would be sweet.

untitled...

     I miss Mary. Why did we banish her from the Sanctuary?

on second thought...

     Maybe I'm really supposed to be one of those wealthy laymen you read about in Church history. It does seem to suit me, for what that's worth.

an exercise in automatic writing...

I don't know what the sea is doing tonight
the Gadarene swine seem to have swarmed into the city
do lilies grow in fields do birds never toil for their keep?
fog rolled over us at breakfast with bourbon outside
bituminous are the rocks at the waters edge
I never know what the sea is doing anymore 
don't look at the sun keep gazing at your shadow
drops dripped branches cracked ice tortured leaves
toil away for the lasting crown as the lilies toil away
never know never what the sea is doing don't look

revelation...

     You know, this here blog has long past drifted into complete irrelevance. I continue to post here out of sheer cussedness. I like writing for the three or four people who still stop by. 
     It's an apocalypse out there, so be careful.

thesis...

     If it's a work of political philosophy, then the argument of Plato's Republic - inasmuch as it has one - is utilitarian. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.
     

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.
    

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...