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.