The Absence: An Advent Meditation on Faith, Doubt and Uncertainty

The presence of an absence—I first heard that phrase used at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., to describe the vanished Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, an absence felt as an enduring rebuke to easiness. In an infinitely happier way, it is what you might experience at the Abbey of Gethsemane, in the sanctuary and the halls of the guest quarters, in the garden and in the acres of fields and hills that surround the monastery—a sense that in the pregnant silence that pervades the place there is concealed something protean and organic, concealed because you have to befriend this silence and listen to it, something truer and more real that you have known in the realm of sound and fury that most of us live.

 The place has that kind of effect on people, in part certainly because silence—like its sister, solitude—is experienced infrequently by many, for whom these monastic staples are vaguely shameful. I went to Gethsemane for the first time, two autumns ago, uneasy about a long weekend of total silence, solitude, and what I anticipated as mandatory solemnity, and left after three days feeling I had been on a month-long vacation. I live happily in the wired world of the Internet and smart phones, of argument and opinions and words—words, words, words—and appreciate all the ways that humans make noise in the world, but you can’t really know the extent to which this noise is a burden and a distraction until, for so little as a day, you turn it off.

But I don’t doubt that many others experience the silence of Gethsemane—or silence and solitude wherever they seek it out—quite differently, as the absence of a presence, empty of greater meaning, and resist what they regard as the tricks of the mind to fill the void with comforting emanations from without. And they are happy to regard the silence as a blessing in itself, a vacation from noise and bullshit and exhortations to empty one’s wallet.

More and more do I experience it that way myself. There were times in the past, including times of my most momentous and fateful decisions, when I felt—or imagined I felt—something like what some people have described as the “hand of God” at work in my life. I believed, or convinced myself to believe, that I was “doing God’s will.” In silence, I was aware of a presence.

Not so much anymore. Absence is what I have become aware of, absence and randomness—which is the awareness of the absence of order, of a rational scheme to things—and the indifference of nature. Age certainly has something to do with this. So too does being a parent; this experience does all kinds of things by way of making you more human, and one of those things is to make you starkly aware (as opposed to merely intellectually cognizant) of how little control you have…over anything. It is one thing to nod your head when you hear that the rain falls on the just and the unjust, that bad things happen to good people, and even to accept that despite all your good intentions bad things have happened to you, but it is quite another thing altogether to realize that your child’s life is subject to a fate that is entirely random and capricious and utterly indifferent to the annihilation of your heart.

 Losing my parents likely has had something to do with it as well; one does feel, even at 50, orphaned, adrift from one’s moorings, out at sea. I recall when my mother died two summers ago I went to look out at Lake Erie, wondering if I might sense something of her presence; instead what I felt, if anything, was her leaving. A strong wind was up that morning and the brush and tall grass that cover the slope leading down to the lake, and the weeds and shrubbery between the rocks of the breakwater were blowing about madly. My mother had had a long decline that was painful to watch since she had left us in every essential way long before she actually died, and I could only think that if there was any emanation at all it was that of her spirit, released at last from old age and the clutches of modern medicine, somewhat violently shaking loose of the world. And, of course, the death of one’s parents leaves you with a clearer vision than before that your own little narrative also has a beginning, middle and an end.

 And yet I am not (I hope) talking about an absence of faith, not talking about the “loss” of my faith, only about the forfeit of what I hope to say are the shallower promises of “certainty,” which I also hope to say is a counterfeit of faith. Absence, darkness, skepticism and doubt, an acute perception that you and I live on the edge of a precipice and that there are a thousand and one ways that people will slip and fall—these may be obstacles to certainty (if that’s what you want) but to faith I don’t believe they are so much obstacles as the cold, sharp stepping stones to a deeper one.

Absence is written into the Judeo-Christian sacred stories: Jonah in the belly of the whale; Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane; and most hauntingly in the cry from the cross, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”  St. John of the Cross’ La noche oscura de la alma has made the “dark night of the soul” a staple of the language of discipleship. And the signature music of the Medieval period, assumed to be a era of credulity and unquestioning belief, seems to me to be a music of absence; the silences and hollows and mournful echoes of the Gregorian plainchant reflect an era that understood better than ours that life could be cold, harsh and random, that G-d could seem to be absent.

Still, faith is allied in many minds with certainty, with fiery conviction, with a refusal to entertain doubt, a refusal to rest easily with the absences in silence. Faith-as-certainty is not a modern phenomenon by any means—it is a (dangerous) temptation anywhere, anytime of any faith whose object is one of ultimate concern—nor is it by any means exclusive to any particular brand of faith. But living as we do in an age when religion has been politicized and weaponized—and the weapons to which it might lay claim are ultimate—it should not be surprising that in the decade since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, this notion of faith-as-certainty has come to be viewed as frightening and dangerous.

And we have witnessed in our time as a counterforce a new confidence of atheist writers and thinkers—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris among them—who have prompted many closeted doubters who have been silently seething beneath the noisy cultural dominance of religion to come out and declare themselves as skeptics. Leave aside for the moment that they speak with their own brand of certainty; speaking personally, I think (as I have said elsewhere on this blog) this is a positively good development for faith by forcing it, so to speak, to clear its voice and say what it means, and what it doesn’t mean, and to confront its contradictions and stupidities. Moreover, to the extent that anyone comes to their atheism or their skepticism honestly, through soul searching and contemplation, and are honest in their assertions about their reverence for science and reason (for these are what atheists typically claim to hold in highest regard) it must be admitted that they are taking their lives and their souls and the questions of faith more seriously than do many people whose religious convictions are reflexive and automatic.

Now, I have read “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” by Christopher Hitchens (he was a favorite writer of mine, apart from his ideas about faith; his recent death is an enormous loss) and I did not think it was a brilliant piece of work. He reads the Bible in as hamfisted a way as any fundamentalist, and misses entirely great themes of scripture—the liberation of peoples from bondage and servitude in the Old Testamant; the radical way in which Jesus continually transgresses against the cultural norms and power structures of his day in the Gospels; the transcending of religious tribalism and racial boundaries that marks the apostleship of Paul and the growth of the early church—that he might, as a humanist and internationalist, have appreciated.

But Hitchens, who liked to mock the “celestial dictatorship” that he says people of faith are wishing for, has an argument that the faithful should confront, and which is directly relevant to whether faith can encompass doubt and skepticism. The argument is this: The fascist and totalitarian instinct in politics and society is related to the human wish for an Absolute Answer that will absolve us of the uncertainty, doubt and ambiguity that plagues us in life, the wish for a Presence that will fill up all of the absences we feel in human existence. That kind of Presence, abolishing uncertainty, is bound to be tyrannical; HItchens compares the image of G-d to that of “Big Brother,” and denounces with disgust the fact that religion (so he claims) commands us to “love that which we also fear—the essence of sadomasochism.”

In this, Hitchens and his atheist compatriots are arguing against faith-as-certainty, and I can only say that to that extent their point is inarguable. The disciples of something like a Celestial Dictatorship, eager to inflict their version of The Truth on everyone around them, are legion. But it is also more than arguable that their certainty is not the faith of the Bible, and that the Celestial Dictatorship described by Hitchens is not the G-d who revealed himself in Jesus Christ.

What, then, is faith if it is not about “certainty”? For myself, I find it useful to think of faith not as a matter of assenting to certain creeds or beliefs, but as fidelity, an intentional “staying with”—staying with the difficult marriage or relationship, the hopeless or perilous situation, the friend or stranger in need. Think of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane lamenting that none of his friends would stay awake with him. Think of it also as an intentional staying with—or staying awake to—life itself, of living with eyes wide open, a determination to participate fully in one’s life, whatever its circumstances or trials, and however full of darkness and absence it may at times seem.

In the novel To Know a Woman by Israeli author Amos Oz there is a charming depiction of a secular version of something like this kind of faith-as-fidelity. Yoel Ravid is a middle-aged widower, taking care of his aged mother and mother-in-law and teenage daughter in the wake of his wife’s death under mysterious circumstances. In the last pages, after a convoluted plot reaches an ambiguous resolution, we see Yoel working as a volunteer in a hospital, comforting patients and doing various odd jobs.

The first few times he was mainly set to work in the laundry….Yoel’s job was to sort out what had to be boiled and what needed a delicate wash. To empty the pockets of the dirty pajamas. And to enter on the appropriate form how many sheets, how many pillowcases, and so forth. Bloodstains and filth, the acrid smell of urine, the stench of sweat and other body fluids, traces of excrement on the sheets and pajamas, patches of dried vomit, medicine stains, the intense whiff of tormented bodies—all these aroused in him neither disgust nor loathing…He yielded himself to it with silent elation: I am alive. Therefore I take part. Unlike the dead.

The novel’s conclusion has a pleasant convalescent feel to it, such as one experiences when an enormous tension has been resolved. 

And so Yoel Ravid began to give in. Since he was capable of observing, he grew fond of observing in silence. With tired but open eyes. Into the depth of the darkness. And if it was necessary to focus the gaze and remain on the lookout for hours and days, even for years, well there was no finer thing than this to do. Hoping for a recurrence of one of those rare, unexpected moments when the blackness is momentarily illuminated, and there comes a flicker, a furtive glimmer, which one must not miss, one must not be caught off guard. Because it may signify a presence which makes us ask ourselves what is left. Besides elation and humility.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from his prison cell where he was held by the Nazis before being executed for his part in the officer’s plot on Hitler’s life, famously sketched out a more theological vision of faith for modern Christians living in “a world come of age,” a world in which he says “before God and with God we live without God.” In several ways, his thoughts—though he never got to formally expand on them—speak powerfully to contemporary challenges to faith and to the need to embrace uncertainty and absence. “I discovered and I’m still discovering right up to this moment,” Bonhoeffer wrote,


“…that it is only by living completing in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint or a converted sinner or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings but those of God in the world—watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That I think is faith; that is metanoia [repentance]; and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian.”

 For Bonhoeffer, God’s presence is found not in strength—not in signs and symbols and sound and fury that the adherents to faith-as-certainty look for (and that the disciples of Celestial Dictatorship wish for)—but in weakness. “God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross,” he wrote. “He is weak and powerless in the world and that is the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.”

G-d, then does not exist in the world to provide Absolute Answers to our uncertainties and ambiguities, but as a as a companion, suffering with us in the absence and randomness and indifference of nature, and inviting us to solidarity with Him and with each other, and with all of suffering creation. In this may be the essential Christian—and Christmas message--Emanuelle, God With Us.

From the jail in Tegel, where Bonhoeffer wrote to his family and friends, he told his confidant Eberhard Bethge early in December 1943 that “a prison cell, in which one waits, hopes, and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.”

And Advent is not a bad picture of the life-in-waiting that characterizes the human condition, suspended in a state of uncertainty, of incomplete knowledge, at times painfully aware of the absence of that which we still wait for. So we wait with open eyes in the darkness until, at any moment, the door is opened and a new light is shed—at which time possibly, and possibly well before we die, we will know something else.

J. Edgar: Not Epic Enough

In Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar, the legendary FBI director describes Richard Nixon—the mirror image of Hoover's own internal repression and manifest unscrupulousness—as “immense.” It would be an apt term for Hoover himself. Long ago, before revelations about his corrupt use of covert information to blackmail and frighten virtually everyone in Washington, and before speculation about his personal life marred his reputation, Hoover occupied an immense place in the nation’s imagination as a crime fighter extraordinaire. He significantly shaped a Cold War-era sensibility about the vulnerability of the nation to internal threats. And he was, along with Nixon and Kissinger, a prominent player in the debauchery of democracy at that time, an American Caligula whose special fondness for using covertly obtained information about sexual indiscretions to blackmail the powerful reflected a vast insecurity about his own sexuality.

In seeking to encompass this immensity on the screen, J. Edgar endeavors to tell at least four separate stories. They are these: 1) how Hoover was moved by the violence of the “Red Scare” in the early 1920s to found a new crime-fighting division within the Department of Justice, using “scientific” methods such as fingerprinting; 2) the growth of the FBI into a national icon, and of the myths of the “G-man” and of Hoover’s own personal involvement in such celebrated Bureau success stories as solving the mystery of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and the shooting of John Dillinger; in both cases Hoover's involvement was exaggerated or wholly fabricated in the service of his keen talent for public relations and hunger for adulation; 3) the long-time, occluded relationship Hoover maintained with aide Clyde Tolson, widely—but not unanimously—assumed to be homosexual in nature; and 4) the use Hoover repeatedly made of personal, especially sexual, information for purposes of blackmail or intimidation, most notoriously in the case of Martin Luther King when the Bureau forged a letter to King encouraging him to commit suicide.

In telling these stories reasonably well, and with the technical panache for which Clint Eastwood is admired, the film tells none of them exceptionally well and succeeds mainly in revealing the timid, emotionally clotted figure behind the fabricated G-man image. The result is curiously deflating, and emotionally distancing. And there are some distinctly odd aspects to this movie. Most notably, there is the matter of cosmetics as the characters age—what one reviewer called “ghastly slatherings of old age make-up”—and some really freakish attempts to approximate the appearance of certain real life characters. Hoover himself is done reasonably well as a corpulent senior, but Clyde Tolson—handsome and dashing as a young man—looks positively entombed as an old one. Robert Kennedy appears to be weirdly and witlessly grinning throughout a conversation with Hoover in which the latter is blackmailing RFK’s brother, and the Nixon that appears in J Edgar has to be the most comically absurd attempt at verisimilitude ever put on celluloid. If there is some stylistic comment being made here—i.e., that all politicians wear masks that are grotesque covers for their distorted real selves; or that Tolson entombed himself through a life of slavish devotion to Hoover, etc.,—it is lost in the plain strangeness of these devices.

Leonardo DiCaprio is quite good in his role, especially as the younger J. Edgar. And the relationship with his imperious mother is very well rendered. But even here there is something all too predictable and diminishing. Of course, Mother is a domineering bitch sculpting her son in the service of her own narcissistic needs, instructing him early on like a wind-up toy that he is to gain back the family “glory” and compensate for the (of course) alcoholic failure of a father, all the while smothering her son sexually and ruthlessly condemning the homosexuality of which she must have been aware early on (“I’d rather have a dead son than a daffodil,” she tells him.) Judy Dench plays this thankless stereotype about as well as it can be played—I can imagine an Academy Award nomination—and the film does convey the sense of a loveless maternal magnificence to which Hoover might have been captive.

The movie also deftly leaves open to interpretation the precise nature of the relationship between Hoover and Tolson. That they were gay lovers has been disputed by some who knew both men well, and who plausibly argue that Hoover—exquisitely, one might say, expertly sensitive to the damage that personal indiscretions could do to reputation—served in a time when a revelation of homosexuality spelled the end of a career. But the most sensational of whispers, that Hoover participated in crossdressing rituals (a rumor that has been roundly disputed and never corroborated), is hinted at obliquely in the film when, after his mother’s death, he dons her pearls and dress.

Whatever the truth about Hoover’s sexual life—I think it is possible to believe that the relationship with Tolson was an idealized gentleman’s affection that substituted for a physical intimacy of which Hoover may have been incapable—what’s clear is that there was a relationship between his own tortured sexual ambivalence and the paranoid use he made of sexual blackmail. There is the real fascination of the Hoover story, insufficiently captured in this film: the occult relationship between profound emotional dis-jointedness, closeted sexual instincts, and political corruption, especially in the case of one who exerted such a vast influence over politics for close to five decades.

All the more fascinating is the fact that late in his life, and at a peak of Hoover’s power, he had a rival in political psychopathy in the figure of Richard Nixon. It is quite interesting and insightful, I think, that the Hoover  of this movie recognizes that in Nixon he may have met his Machiavellian match. And equally penetrating that it is Nixon, alone among the politicians Hoover faces off with, who crudely identifies the FBI director for what he is (“that cocksucker,” Nixon calls him) and who is determined to wrest from Hoover after his death the “personal” files that gave Hoover his sway over everyone in Washington. (We may assume, also, that in Nixon, Hoover was confronted with a figure not likely to provide the kind of blackmail-worthy sexual indiscretions that filled that file.) The movie depicts the files being shredded by Hoover’s ever loyal secretary Helen Gandy, but in fact much of the contents are available for public reading in the National Archives. In a November 9 article in the Washington Post, Kenneth Ackerman, author of “Young J. Edgar: Hoover and the Red Scare, 1919-1920,” writes that the files “paint a stark portrait of power run amok.”

Nixon outlasted Hoover. But there is cunning to history, and even after his death the figure of Hoover exerted an influence over events. Nixon was determined to appoint a non-entity as a successor to the directorship of the bureau—and did so in the person of J. Patrick Grey—the better to tame the bureau and politicize it in the service of the vast crimes that were the Watergate scandal. But Mark Felt, a long-serving FBI agent and associate director had long coveted the job, and it was partly out of revenge for being passed-over that he betrayed Nixon, serving as the Washington Post’s famous “Deep Throat” source, helping to bring the President down.

It should take the breath away to realize that during a period of peak domestic discord, the two most powerful positions in government were held at the same time by men afflicted with extraordinary paranoia and severe disorganizations of personality. The wreckage that this nexus inflicted on American democracy is for historians, and some other filmmaker, still to consider.

The World Outside Your Door: Memory Lane, Mulates and Debauche in New Orleans

When I was nineteen, I took a bus trip across the country, staying in youth hostels wherever I went. This journey took me from my home on the east coast across the country to San Francisco and the Grand Canyon, and included a memorable hitch-hiking adventure up and down the Big Sur coast of California. But my first stop, and in many ways the most memorable was in New Orleans. Six or eight hours into my first
leg of the itinerary it must have sunk in that I was on my own and there was no turning back. This was a welcome sensation to be sure, but also an unsettling one. Some thirty hours later after short layovers in dusty bus depots in the Old Confederacy--Montgomery, Mobile, Biloxi--and an interminable drive along the Gulf Coast by an unusually law-abiding bus driver (when passengers began to demand that he step on it, he pulled the bus over to the side of the road and lectured everyone on how he was not going to break the speed limit) I arrived in a strange city after dark.
  I was scared, but found my way to the youth hostel on Canal Street, at the time an old converted motel. When I climbed the stairs with my backpacks to the dorms upstairs I found the hall lined with people my own age playing cards, smoking (am I dating myself?), drinking beer---and I knew I was going to be okay.
I've been back to New Orleans half a dozen times or more since then, and it always brings back memories.
  Back then I stayed in the French Quarter and rode the streetcar out to the Garden District. On return visits I've been happy to scout out things off that beaten path. Here is Mulates, which is in fact not far off the beaten path (it's up the street from the mammoth Convention Center) and is not exactly unknown. But it offers the real Cajun thing.

On more recent trips to New Orleans I've discovered Fauborg Marigny, the neighborhood on the lip of the quarter. Frenchman Street has great live music (some of it on the streets) and is more favored by locals than by tourists (although a local in one of the places I visited lamented that this was changing; "Our beloved Frenchman Street is becoming overrun with tourists," he said. Well, this tourist happened upon an awesome local talent, "Debauche," a group that bills itself as a "Russian Mafia Band." Think the Pogues, only in Russian. I would fly back to New Orleans solely to see this band play again. Here's their website, http://debauchemusic.com/. And here's a clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hva2v18q1cE

The World Outside Your Door: Classical Revolution San Francisco

At the Pause Wine Bar on Market Street in San Francisco, I witnessed the Classical Revolution. Founded by violist Charith Premawardhana in 2006, Classical Revolution brings live classical music out of the concert halls and into popular local venues--bars, coffee shops and taverns--where the dress is casual, the atmosphere is friendly and relaxed, and the goal is to have fun in a familiar place you share with neighbors and friends.

Apologies for the poor (nonexistent) lighting in the video. In the pic, Charith is on the viola at the far right. I don't know the names of the other musicians. Charith founded Classical Revolution at the Revolution Cafe in the city's Mission District. Since then, the movement has spread to cities across the United States, Europe and Asia (see http://www.classicalrevolution.com/).

For information about Classical Revolution in Cleveland see http://classicalrevolutioncle.com/ or on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ClassicalrevolutionCLE) . And see my article in the Lakewood Observer http://www.lakewoodobserver.com/read/2011/10/19/a-classical-revolution-comes-to-the-root-cafe.

The World Outside Your Door: Grace Episcopal in San Francisco

Joan Didion, in her 1976 essay “James Pike: American,” recalls the Grace Episcopal Church of her childhood memories, its “big rose windows” glowing at night, as the “nexus of all old California money,” a monument to the state’s pioneer history, emblematic of a perpetual quest and as such a spiritual work-in progress whose construction would never be “finished”—that is, until Bishop James Pike, a man in a hurry to be on the cutting edge of everything, would arrive on the scene in 1964, raise $3 million and pronounce Grace “finished.” In this way, Grace and the story of Pike—a quintessential figure of the 1960s who would die wandering around in the Judean desert—become a parable for an American (or, anyway, Californian) tendency to discard history in the  quest for the “new.”

Its a beautiful structure and I caught it on a late afternoon with the setting sun burnishing the face of the Cathedral.

You Really Need to Lighten Up

You really need to lighten up.....Something I have heard more than once in my life. My father told me this on a couple of occassions. So this will be a feature for this blog, which I want to revive and which seems to me entirely too precious and solemn.

Border collies! How cool are they? Alas, mine doesn't play volleyball.

Night Sky on the Eve of October

A parting of clouds in the sky tonight

Left a small moaning moon in a sea of deep blue,

And banks of grey cloud, like cliffs

Encroaching the sea,

Blushed with moonlight like white rouge.

It was stunning, allow me to say,

And insisted itself on the night

As some God-drenched canvass

Of the American west

Might insist on meaning or purpose,

A sign in the sky.

And on another night in summer, say,

In the drench of one passion or other

I might want to believe.  

But it is October now

And the earth-bound world

Has its own emanations:

The smell of backyard bonfires in oil drums,

Clam bakes, chimney smoke,

And down by the lake

The sound like a stitching

The train makes on the town’s tracks.

Its whistle sings and

Dog barks echo as through a megaphone.

These redound in the brittle air

To themselves alone,

As if to say, here is the world you know,

And you have work to do.

That moon up there? It is small and cold.

The icy sea it floats in is sky,

As hollow as the barrel the dogs are barking in

Those clouds are just clouds,

Great banks of them.

And winter is closing in.

Ruling Out Shared Sacrifice

I'll be posting some things in anticipation of the 9/11 anniversary. I urge everyone to read this piece by Frank Rich http://nymag.com/print/?/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/frank-rich/
What I remember most about the day, and its immediate aftermath, was the readiness of people everywhere to do something. An enormous, enormous opportunity to engage the entire American people was forfeited.

The money quote from Rich's article:

"... the key move Bush made after 9/11 had nothing to do with military strategy or national-security policy. It was instead his considered decision to rule out shared sacrifice as a governing principle for the fight ahead. Sacrifice was high among the unifying ideals that many Americans hoped would emerge from the rubble of ground zero, where so many Good Samaritans had practiced it. But the president scuttled the notion on the first weekend after the attack, telling Americans that it was his "hope" that "they make no sacrifice whatsoever" beyond, perhaps, tolerating enhanced airline security. Few leaders in either party contradicted him. Bush would soon implore us to "get down to Disney World in Florida" and would even lend his image to a travel-industry ad promoting tourism. Our marching orders were to go shopping.
    From then on, it was a given that any human losses at wartime would be borne by a largely out-of-sight, out-of-mind, underpaid volunteer army and that the expense would be run up on a magic credit card. Even as the rising insurgency in Iraq began to stress American resources to the max in 2003, Bush doubled down on new tax cuts and pushed through a wildly extravagant new Medicare entitlement for prescription drugs to shore up his reelection prospects with elderly voters. David Walker, then the comptroller general, called it "the most reckless fiscal year in the history of the republic."

Corner Streelight

It’s the streetlamp light we all know here

In America land

Where the pavements meet;

The shadowed porch and the windows lit

Like liquor bottle glass,

Amber and blue,

Furtive motion like rumors inside,

And the lamp lit corner where she waited

And waited as a child for you

Then stumbled home at last

Past her world she thought she knew

The shape of her diminishments in view

And wept, plain girl, into a grimy fist.

Now slaps the screen door in the August heat

And a man steps out to contemplate

The tipping of the Earth

Into another fall.

He’s lived there long enough to know

Where all of summers’ dramas ghosts will go

As you, grown gaunt in solitude,

And she have gone,

And about the murmur in the leaves

Of that dread season coming on.

So he turns inside again to sleep

Beyond the windows amber and blue

And leaves behind the lamp lit stage

Where she waited and waited

And waited as a child for you.

Being Deep in the Grooves of Your Past Lives

          

The Forces

by Michael Blumenthal
Who, having lived more than a moment,
hasn't contended with them? You go out,
dreaming a mastery of your own life, bending the brush
as you walk, kicking the leaves. Just yesterday,
in a numinous moment, you were king
of your own book, a blank slate that could strut
and choose, a walking freedom with legs
that could say, I am this, and - poof! -
you were it. But, today, you're your old self
again, deep in the grooves of your past lives
like a skier come late to a mountain who,
frictionless, almost, and full of himself for no reason,
glides down the path of all who preceded him.
Sure, you've grieved and mourned, you've lain down
on numerous couches, and, still, the childhood wishes,
with their minute, occasional lisps forward,
are waiting to greet you. Who hasn't come
to the place of the three highways and, thinking
himself a free man, taken the road toward Delphi
merely to wind up with his head in the lap
of his own mother? Who hasn't swashbuckled his way
into a freedom at once so terrifying and familiar
he thinks he's arrived at some island exotica
only to stagger up over a hill and see there,
before him, the old door, the mansard roof,
the white tiles, of that strangely familiar place
he has no choice but to call: home. Who among us
wouldn't gladly be the chooser, if only choice
weren't a vast road looping over and over
to arrive at the same place? So why not
make peace with it? Every mother is enterable,
and every father dead on some highway to Thebes
or some truck-stop heading toward Kansas or Manhattan.
So ski down the hill, friend, enjoy the fresh air,
the illusory high, the dark fact that something
chooses us over and over until we're chosen for real.

This magnificent poem was sent to me--along with a batch of other brilliant things-by a friend on my 51st birthday.

The Wisdom of Various 12-Year Olds, Torture, Honorable and Dishonorable Celebrations

A twelve-year old I know expressed a thought recently which made me rather proud to be her father. All the more so because (and later this made me question myself) I didn’t automatically agree with her. Certainly, it was a thought that cut against a common grain, and I am quite sure was not the “cool” thing to say in the 7^th grade (although—as I remind myself, and an consistently being reminded by circumstance—what the hell do I know about being in 7^th grade?)

What she said was, approximately, this: The celebration of Osama bin Laden’s death is disturbing. “I mean, a guy got shot in the head,” she said. “Why are people making that into a party?”

(She’s a very, very, very good writer, and if she keeps up this habit of critically distancing herself from everything around her she’s got a great chance of becoming a persistently melancholy, intermittently cantankerous writer of obscure journalism and a catastrophically obscure weblog.)

Oh, hi! Didn’t see you there. As I was saying…. she’s got a great chance of becoming a perceptive and nuanced interpreter of current events and an influential opinion-maker in the marketplace of ideas!! (Note exclamation points!!)

…..She’s right, though, some Americans could stand to check in with what exactly they are celebrating.  I read a genuinely moving account written by a World Trade Center survivor who had lost a great many friends and colleagues and only barely escaped death himself and who, upon learning the news, poured himself an Irish whiskey and raised a two-word toast to the now deceased leader of world-wide jihad: “Fuck you.”

That guy has a right to feel that way. But some others are pretending to a bloodthirsty righteousness not nearly so authentic. Here for instance is Sarah Palin “tweeting” her opinion about whether photographs of Osama bin Laden’s corpse should be released. “Show photo to others seeking America’s destruction. No pussy-footing around, no politicking, no drama; it’s part of the mission.”

How old is she, 12? And what the hell is she talking about, anyway?

Never mind. But along the same lines of people flexing their muscles about American prowess, etc. etc. etc., there is an extremely important debate now percolating about whether information obtained through the torture of detainees at Guantanamo was crucial to locating bin Laden. As Andrew Sullivan points out (for expert coverage of this debate see his blog http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/the-big-lie-.html), it is telling that some of the more degenerate voices on the right are now seizing on this moment of national victory to justify the torture policies of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld regime. I say that even if some vital information was produced by torture—along with the static of lies and misinformation and desperate babble that a tortured individual is bound to cough up—it doesn’t prove that bin Laden couldn’t have been tracked-down sooner or later using standard methods of military-detective work. There was no “ticking bomb.” And if capturing bin Laden was literally impossible without torture-derived information—which I don’t believe—then I’ll say it: it wasn’t worth it. My views on the subject of torture from three years ago are here http://www.lakewoodobserver.com/read/2007/06/10/outrage.

But I’m glad that this particular mission is “accomplished” and that this time the phrase isn’t a joke. And I am glad because this is the reason a great many very fine Americans half my age and younger went off to Afghanistan, some of whom are coming back with missing limbs.

But I’ll also check in with my own less honorable, partisan slant on this celebration. Because my strongest positive feeling about this is that it was a vindication of our President who has been vilified from the beginning as being in all sorts of ways off the grid, outside the norm, not an American. Socialist, Muslim, born somewhere else, “paling around with terrorists.” Or, alternately, naïve, sentimental, a “post-national multiculturalist,” unaware of the “dangerous world we live in,” unwilling to risk the use of force in a worthy cause. Etc., etc., etc.

I have always felt this is a serious misreading of the man, for which some people on the right would be really embarrassed if they were capable of embarrassment. Anyone remember the Pirates who kidnapped the Navy officer? The geniuses at Fox News spent several days wringing their hands over the fact that Obama wouldn’t do anything about it. Then a Navy Seal (who are these guys anyway?) pops the pirate in the head with a single shot, and it turns out it was on Obama’s order.

 So I can’t help it, I am enjoying the discomfiture of some of his opponents who now have no choice but to applaud the President for an accomplishment they would have liked to claim for their own.

Easter: I dont know what the hell happened

Seven Stanzas  for Easter
by John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

I posted this poem by Updike on Easter Sunday, wanting mainly to put something up for Easter—then got lost in some very academic maunderings about the Biblical accounts of the resurrection. Later, it felt inauthentic—the truth is, I don’t know what the hell to think about the resurrection story—and I was probably in over my head anyway. So I deleted it.

But I’m re-posting the Updike poem—it’s a good one, regardless of the theology. I had wanted to post something about Updike on the anniversary of his death in January, but I failed to do it. I may still—he was a towering writer, and though I have read only one of his novels I admire him greatly. A friend of mine suggests, wisely, that the poem might in fact be arguing against Biblical literalism—that’s a keen insight because Updike is clearly expressing that the wish for literalism, for a “real angel” and the “vast rock of materiality,” is just that: a wish. Another wise friend of mine says only that Easter is evidence of the “appalling naivete of Christians.” She says: “one DOES die, one doesn't go on and on, looking down from Heaven, sitting at the right hand of whomever.”

Yes, possibly. Who knows? And no one can “know” any better what precisely happened, in an historical sense, on the third day after a Palestinian Jewish mystic itinerant preacher was murdered on a cross two thousand years ago. But my original posting was an attempt to assert that there is a way to read the resurrection stories without recourse to cartoon science fiction imagery of bodies floating up from graves, that may not even be about the “next life” but about a renewed birth of vitality in this one; not about certainty regarding the afterlife, but a new freedom to live fearlessly in the face of uncertainty, death and ambiguity.

Light Through Windows: The Conspirator

Fans of painterly cinematography, of the conscious manipulation of images to create an effect, will want to see “The Conspirator,” Robert Redford’s new dramatization of the trial of Mary Surratt. A very painterly film, this one—think, maybe, of Johannes Vermeer and his pictures of light pouring through windows.

There is a lot of light through windows in “The Conspirator.” Scene after scene of light pouring through windows. But here the light is harsh—characters squint into it, uneasily—and the subjects are not the graceful maidens of Vermeer. They are tense soldiers and lawyers, angry and calculating politicians, frightened witnesses and family members. And there is Mary Surratt, played by Robin Wright, looking alternately serene and devout (when at prayer in her jail cell), or pained and distrustful and trapped (when she is in the trial court).

Mary Surratt was a confessed supporter of the Confederacy and the owner of the boardinghouse where John Wilkes Booth met from time to time with others who conspired to strike a blow against the government by killing not only Lincoln, but Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Mary’s son John was heavily implicated in the plot (but never convicted) and in “The Conspirator” Mary is portrayed as being used by the government as bait to ensnare the son. She is eventually hung after a military tribunal, in which witnesses are traduced and the outcome appears to be pre-ordained by a government hungry for revenge and eager to douse, forever, the dying embers of southern rebellion.

The parallel to the controversy today over the legal status of detainees in the war on terror is evident enough. But anyone expecting standard-issue Hollywood liberal polemic will not find it in this movie. There is, first of all, plenty of room to doubt Mary Surratt’s innocence. And the rational for a military tribunal—which roughly parallels that for detainees in Guantanamo—is given a full hearing: the full dimensions of conspiracy against the government were not known and a civilian trial could compromise security.

And, too, the drama bristles with the seething grievances of a nation that has been severely traumatized. Just ended was an exhausting war, the bloodiest ever seen anywhere in history, one that was instigated—from the northern perspective—by rebels in pursuit of a morally besmirched cause. Explicit reference is made to the treatment of Union prisoners by the rebels, a reference surely to the infamous prison at Andersonville where more than 12,000 Union soldiers died of starvation, malnutrition, diarrhea and disease. The Confederate officer in charge of the prison was convicted of war crimes, and news of the conditions at the prison stoked Northern instincts for retribution. And after all of this, the President is shot in a conspiracy that was believed by many to be widespread. There were those in the North, and in the President’s cabinet (especially Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, played by Kevin Kline) who were determined to put the screws to the South.

And on the other side the argument in Mary Surratt’s favor that makes itself felt most strongly, though it is insinuated rather than stated, is one that might discomfit Redford and others of contemporary liberal disposition.  Because the entire conduct of the rigged trial would seem to be, in its way, a vindication of the Confederate cause. I was waiting for Mary to say to her lawyer, something like this: “Look at what is happening. Don’t you see it? This is what we were fighting against. You flatter yourself that you were fighting to end slavery or to preserve your precious Union. But what you have succeeded in preserving is the right of distant power to exercise its will, to have its way and to claim it is doing it for the general good. Now your side has won and we are all—you, me, everyone everywhere— going to have to pay the piper. Because now this power---it is located in Washington, but it might as well be on the moon for all it knows about me or my life and my family, or about you and yours—will always have its way, and will rationalize what it is doing, and later it will write the history that says it was doing the Lord's work because it was for the greater good.” 

The characters are trapped in their own necessarily thwarted understanding of their historical circumstances, an entrapment captured during the trial scenes with a kind of staccato imagery so that one glimpses the agonized faces of the participants as they might look in faded black and white photographs. The light from outside, from all of those windows, might be the light of the truths we would like to think are self-evident—about how individuals are innocent until proven guilty, about the  right to a trial before a jury of peers--the truths that persist outside, above and beyond our own limited understanding of our circumstances.

Except that in times such as those depicted in “The Conspirator,” or in such fraught times as our own, those truths can be too harsh to bear. The film would seem to dare us to condemn the men behind the trial of Mary Surratt. Americans today have largely acquiesced without great protest to the idea that detainees at Guantanamo, some of whom have been held for years now without legal counsel, are too dangerous to risk being set free, even if evidence against them might not stand up in a civil trial. And they have acquiesced, too, to a greatly enlarged government invasion of their own privacy.

Well, so we live in dangerous times, and conceivably the tribunals are a necessary concession to an extreme situation. However, I believe the torture of some of those detainees at Guantanamo is another matter, an unambiguous wrong, and a great stain on American honor. And the two issues--torture and the conduct of legal proceedings against the detainees--now cannot be separated since undoubtedly one of the reasons the authorities recoil from a civil trial is because much or all of the evidence they have against these men has been garnered through methods that would make the information inadmissable in a civil court.

No one thought to waterboard Mary Surratt or her confederates. And the movie makes clear that in her day, as in ours, fear is the real enemy of reason and sanity when the world seems dangerous. What is needed are clear heads, sober minds and sharp eyes to discern what truth we can in the ambiguous shadows of our own murky history. Armchair warriors, gossip merchants with megaphones, the politically shameless who would exploit legitimate fears for partisan ends—these all only make it harder to see the light.

"The Judgments of the Lord": On the 150th Anniversary of the Start of the American Civil War

My twelve year old daughter believes I am “obsessed” with the American Civil War. I have explained to her that out of the vast, vast library of words written about the war—battlefield reports, interpretations from every conceivable angle, biographies, plays, fictional novels—I have read only a small handful. I have told her there are individuals whose idea of a summer vacation is to tramp about the battlefields of the great conflict, and that I have visited, years ago, only one of those fields. And I have tried to convey a portrait of the thriving subculture of Civil War “re-enactors,” of which I have no part.  I am not what anyone would call a “buff.”

But I suppose my interest would qualify as at least a “fascination.” Today marks the 150^th anniversary of the first shots of the Civil War when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter, in South Carolina in 1861, so possibly the war is on other minds. The Washington Post has been “tweeting” the events leading up to the conflagration, public television is reprising Ken Burn’s masterful public television series, and the New York Times began, in October, a blog called “Disunion” (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/disunion/) to  chronicle the unfolding of the war in honor of the sesquecentential.

My own small homage to the anniversary is to have read Bruce Catton’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1954 work, “A Stillness at Appomattox.” It is a remarkable read. Catton is, I believe, the grand poo-bah  of Civil War historians, rivaled only by Shelby Foote (who played such a large part in the Ken Burns series). Catton wrote three grand trilogies—The Army of the Potomac (of which “Stillness” is the third), A Centennial History of the Civil War, and a trilogy of Ulysses S. Grant—and a great many other single-volume works on the war (as well as a few stray texts on historical subjects other than war).

“Stillness” chronicles the last campaign of the war, the bitter and savage battles of the Wildnerness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, Cold Harbor, and the Battle of the Crater during the Siege of Petersburg, up to the exhaustion of the Confederate forces and the somber surrender at Appomattox. Catton was a forerunner of today’s “narrative historians” making use of the diaries and unpublished letters of everyday soldiers to give a graphic description of the fight from the ground up. Some quaint, slightly anachronistic rhetorical flourishes give his writing a slightly dated quality, but his work remains definitive. 

What stands out most from the story and constitutes the theme of “Stillness” is that this campaign was, finally, “war with the varnish taken off.” Up to that point, the North had been, in Shelby Foote’s words, “fighting with one hand behind its back.” Robert E. Lee had humiliated one Union general after another and the war had about it the slightly perfumed scent of a gentleman’s gallant dueling match.

Uunburied dead at the Battle of the Wilderness

That would end with Grant’s campaign of 1864-65. Lincoln had finally found, in Grant, a general willing to use the North’s industrial and numerical advantage to pummel the rebels to death, and after the South’s decisive loss the year before at Gettysburg, Grant was determined to do it. From Wilderness to the end at Appomattox, the war would be a slugfest, a bloodletting, vicious and unrelenting and unrefined and very, very, very un-pretty. With each successive battle, Grant moved south and east hoping to cut Lee off from Richmond and finish him off; accordingly Lee kept going in the same direction, hoping to keep ahead of Grant, so that the two armies were in close proximity for the rest of the war, following each other throughout central Virginia and bumping into each other in a series of savage brawls.  

What also stands out from the work is how much earlier the war might have been won, and how many lives saved, were it not for the nearly criminal and certainly heartbreaking and positively shocking ineptitude of the Northern army.  Grant himself is reported by Catton to have wondered at one point, “What is wrong with this army?”

In fact, as Grant and his men would prove many times the Union army was much better than it had come to believe about itself after so many defeats at the hands of Robert E. Lee. But that there was “something wrong” in the Union war machine is clear from Catton’s account. One of the things wrong, surely, was the role played by bureaucrats in the War Department in Washington, which directed the Union effort in a way not notable for efficiency, decisiveness, and a capacity to respond quickly to changing circumstances. And which invariably infected military decisions with politics and personal ambition.

The other trouble was that in addition to the many brave and ferocious warriors in the Union ranks, there were also shirkers, laggards, criminals, and mercenaries of dubious conviction—or, at least, there were many more than the South fielded. However weird and unholy we may think of the Southern “cause” today, the rebels were fighting for what they considered their property—their slaves and their land—and for a way of life that they believed was mortally threatened. These were tangible assets, the kind that are bound always to inspire conviction and a willingness to die; though far smaller, the rebel army was, by Catton’s and every other report, remarkably, uniquely fierce and committed, and  composed almost wholly of boys who were true believers in the cause. The Union, on the other hand, was fighting to end slavery or to preserve the Union—these were more abstract moral imperatives. The men who understood these imperatives deeply, like Joshua Chamberlain, the theology professor from Bowdoin College in Maine and the hero of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, were among the most “American” of Americans, and real heroes of the war. But they were bound to be outnumbered by the many whose major motivation was to finish their service and return home.

The combination of bureaucratic and individual ineptitude—even if the individuals were a minority—created an army that was error prone. At the Battle of the Crater, a plan was undertaken by engineers in the Union army to dig a tunnel underneath the Southern trenches during the siege of Petersburg and mine the tunnel with explosives, blowing a hole in the defenses and opening the way to capture the city. It was not an entirely fantastical plan. The explosion went off blowing a gaping hole in the southern defenses. But, inexplicably, the order for the Union forces to move into the breach was never given until the rebel army had time to regroup. And when the union did move, there was no plan for scaling the walls of dirt created by the explosion, so that the men were trapped. One entire division of black soldiers was slaughtered. The officer who was supposed to be responsible for the assault was said to be far away from the fighting, getting drunk. Grant called it the “saddest affair I have witnessed in this war.”

Catton’s narrative is heavy on battlefield maneuvers, which can be difficult to envision and a slog to read. I will venture to say, hoping the thought police aren’t watching, that this book does not find a lot of female eyes. And I wonder if in fact what my daughter calls an “obsession” isn’t a peculiarly male one. War has always been an affair of men, the less brilliant of the sexes.

But in the case of the American Civil War, this is unfortunate if it’s true (that women don’t take as much interest in it). It was the defining event in our history, and its reverberations are everywhere today, from racial politics to the Tea Party movement. In a funny, but deeply thoughtful work, “Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War,” Tony Horwitz explored this subject. It is primarily a portrait of “re-enactors,” the folks who show up on battle anniversaries to re-fight the war in battle garb, but it is ultimately a meditation on the ways in which the Civil War continues in our day. (Incidentally, Christopher Hitchens also wrote a funny and interesting piece about re-enactors called “Rebel Ghosts.” It can probably be found online somewhere, but it’s included in his collection of essays, “Love, Poverty and War.”)

Certainly in slavery the war engaged a grave moral issue for which men were willing to die. And for this American, much of the fascination of the war derives from the fact that the dying was done, in terrible numbers, on fields that Americans can drive to or past¸ and beside which some Americans live.  The proximity of the enormous, enormous carnage that was the war lends to these spaces—these prosaic fields and farms and woods and valleys, dirt roads and creeks and rivers—something sacred, something that should, if we were paying attention, give us continual reason to be reverential. Actually, if we were paying attention we might be utterly ashamed of the smallness and shrillness of our politics today, which amounts to a squabbling over the takings of a privilege that has largely been handed to us by previous generations.

Because something happened in the war that went beyond what was expected or realized at the time by the men who fought it. It’s this that Lincoln, with his literary genius, captured.  Certainly it is possible to be cynical about the Civil War—that it was about economics and power politics and about keeping a big country big. And reading Catton’s book about the last military campaign will certainly dispel any sentimentality about the war—it was brutal, even vicious, sometimes (as at the Crater) squalid and disgustingly wasteful, and always filled with misery. But it took Lincoln to articulate, in his second inaugural address, that in this all too human affair something beyond what humans could have wrought alone was at work.

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

“Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained….Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding....If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Tripping Over Joy: You and Your 1000 Serious Moves

Tripping over Joy
by Hafez (Sufi poet, circa 1350)

What is the difference
Between your experience of Existence
And that of a saint?
The saint knows
That the spiritual path
Is a sublime chess game with God
And that the Beloved
Has just made such a Fantastic Move
That the saint is now continually
Tripping over Joy
And bursting out in Laughter
And saying, “I Surrender!”
Whereas, my dear,
I’m afraid you still think
You have a thousand serious moves.

I am indebted, for this poem, to Brother Joe Kilikevice, of the Shem Center in Chicago, and the two dozen-plus men I spent this past weekend with on a Male Spirit Retreat.

Take Up Your Mat and Walk: The Paralytic's Friends

The Paralytic’s Friends

(Luke 5: 17-27)

It was murderous hot

And they must have had it about up to here

With hauling this guy around

On a mat.

But you know they loved him too,

They must have been friends from back in the day.

One of the five—it is always this way,

In your age or ours—has had all the bad luck.

Divorce, debt, and a stupid streak

That overcomes his better lights,

And now he’s just decided

Not to get up.

You might almost think it’s another joke—

He was always the clown—

Except that he’s gone quiet too, all shut down and sad.

The four friends want him back on his feet,

They’ve tried this and that. Dear God!

The snake oil guys that roamed the earth

In those days, a craze or fever,

Every third fellow claimed to be God,

As if earth itself, nervous at what it knew was in store,

Coughed up a swarm of lunatics.

So they’d heard about this one, and rolled their eyes.

But there were the crowds, and more than that

Was how they walked away amazed,

And when they spoke could only say

 “This we have never heard before.”

And as for me, I’d been following too,

Waiting for what I couldn’t tell,

Recording the tremors at every stop.

And here I was in the back of the house, 

He had just begun to speak,

When the roof began to crumble,

Dirt and straw and whatnot coming through.

There was a terrible din and the children laughed,

The old lady shouted and shook her fist

And a local curmudgeon was covered in dust.  

The patch in the roof was lifted off

And in came the torturous sun

Then a shadow followed by

The mat coming through.

No one later could quite agree

Exactly what got said.

Much later, when the torpid spectacle had made the rounds,

Caressed by every broken hearted gossip,

It came down to this:

“Your sins are forgiven.”

This may be true, for all I know,

For who would not rise up,

Freed like a spring from its contraption,

From the cage of yesterdays and ancient wrongs,

The slag run-off of time and its regrets

Or hopes squandered like a drunkard’s coins,

The weight of all that past leaning in

And down on the joints of now,

On the crick in the neck, on the bone that cracks?

Who would not rise up

Were that stone rolled back

And the past revealed as an empty tomb?

Ten thousand, thousand shrieking suns

Have risen and sunk since that blasted day

When a flock of pigeons clattered up the sky

From the soot of the crumbling roof

And the crowds came and went

In the ancient clay.

Take up your analytic couches and walk!

Into your own dull daylight

Of rusted plumbing

And everything falling apart,

Take up your life as you would an ailing old friend

Whose hinges are off, whose limbs are unstrung,

Hoist him up—

Crafty, resourceful, shrewd to the end—

And walk.