Laborers

(Matthew 9: 35-38)

  Where are the laborers?  The stalks are bent

and heavy.  Binge-watching.  A devouring fire

the web - our holy texts.  Takes as manna sent

to the starving.  A wasteland of desire

unfulfilled.  The sheep see shepherds everywhere:

they who counsel yet more nails be driven

into rotting wood, and will not forbear

to chop to bits still smaller the already riven.

  In what shepherds should we place our trust,

we the helpless and harassed, listening for the still,

small voice, while turning on the wheel?

Please send no more of these.  We’ve had our fill

of those who say, if not with us, then lost;

of those who, however they come, come not to heal.

True Cross

He was the locutor for and to those who would say,

"I regret everything, I regret it all."

The traditions are wrong.  That cross was

not pieced and parceled, not treasured and saved.

The Romans used it again a week later,

and again and again, until

that hard wood could no longer

be trusted to hold

bodied spikes.

Then it was used to

warm the garrison on a cool evening,

hours after the latest insurrectionist,

murderer, thief, stained it again,

after more judgment, implacable

as the sun, another end-game,

life-changing event.

George Steiner

David and Uriah

(2 Sam. 11: 1-15)

  “As thy soul lives, I will not do this thing.”

So says one of my captains to me.

What is wrong with this man? Can he not see

I seek to spare him dishonor? Is it fitting

for him to refuse the leave I offer now?

I more than he have known the bitterness

of war, the calm thereafter and sweet congresses

of home.  I’ve seen; and what I know, I know.

I did not ask for this, the gravity

of decision and action, the moving of men,

materiel, the fates of nations.  Have I,

the Lord’s viceroy since my youth, failed to see

my duty?  Matters of state take precedence

over whether mere soldiers live, or die.

St. John the Baptist

(Luke 7:18-23)

Nothing will happen before I am to die,

will it, my Lord?  The spirit moved to hail

the lamb of God through these lips.  I

wonder what overtook me.  Did I fail,

or just misspeak? I know - to seek is to find,

to lose, to gain.  Leave off the paradox,

the metaphor - spent candles for a dark mind.

It's said you've brought forth water from the rock;

the captives are released, and perfect peace

has been proclaimed.  But in your name will he,

Herod, my captor, loose this chain?  Not odd

that your undone herald will predecease

you. Nor is it odd that everyone will see

the advent of the same old kingdom of God.

Cathedral Scene

Beyond the cathedral's passageway,

the hostas and hydrangeas blink to see,

mistaking February sunshine for a day

in April, and stretch their budding greenery,

above the columbarium’s nooks.

The refectory’s stately paneled wall

says, “In Te Domine Speravi”: it looks

forward to His coming, and down on all.

Meanwhile, in the nave, a solitary

woman has come to sit.  Her daily world

has turned in ways unthinkable, the very

foundation cracked:  unloved, unloveable,

and still and silent as the sandstone walls

that surround this woman as evening falls.

Notes on Paul Harding's "Tinkers"

A "coming appetite," according to my grandmother, is what you have when you come to the table not very hungry, but the more you eat, the hungrier you get.  "I'd rather feed three hungry men," she'd say, "than one with a coming appetite."

I wasn't real hungry when I started reading Paul Harding's Tinkers, the 2010 Pulitizer winner for fiction (and his first novel to boot). First novels and Pulitizer winners are often a little long on "technique" and rather short on actual storytelling.  The novel's opening sentence ("George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.") not only told me what was going to happen, but seemed to forecast unreadable weirdness on the way there.  But you can't judge a book by its dot dot dot.

I surmise from Harding's post-prize interviews that some of the major grist for this mill are facts from his family history:  his grandfather was a repairer of clocks; his great-grandfather was an epileptic who abandoned his home and family when he learned his wife was about to have him committed to an insane asylum.  From these Harding assembles something of a collage during the dying man's last eight days, covering George Crosby's life, most of his father's, and some of his grandfather's.

These are, the reader starts to sense, unknown or little-known histories.  The family members gathered around the dying George are portrayed lightly but not sympathetically, and they clearly have no idea what is going through the dying man's mind.  A lot of what is going on involves George's father, a seller of supplies from the back of a wagon to folk of the Maine woods, and whom (we ultimately learn) George saw all of once in his father's last forty years or so.  These men, the Crosby's, were hardly understood, and didn't really understand themselves, either.  In explicating them Harding well shows how family ties are, or become, barbed wire.

The voice bounces around here: an omniscient third person most of the time, but sometimes a first person; excerpts from a (fictional) 18th century manual on clock repair; the reader will certainly ask himself at times, how could George have known that?  Still, this is not at all what I'd call experiment fiction, and most of the time the prose sparkles.  Harding makes a lot of the story's ironic possibilities, too:  the taciturn George becomes at the end a great teller of stories (to us), almost a poet of the issues of life and death; the retired mechanical engineer becomes a repairer of things, a tinker, just like the father he barely knew; despite the "cloud of witnesses" George brings to the death-bed via recollection (perhaps hallucination), there is little question here but that every man dies alone.

At 191 pages, this book wasn't long, but it was (to return to my initial, mangled metaphor) quite tasty.  Go ahead, try it.

After Epiphany

(Matt. 2:12)

We took our leave from Herod's court

to limn the light that we had seen,

so this monarch, on our report,

might come to praise an infant king.

Last night I dreamt the blackest dreams:

the soldiers' blades were dripping red.

I heard a mother's wails and screams

for every man-child slain and dead

and Herod, waiting grisly tiding

of the massacre that he had willed.

But yet one child, mother abiding,

when crying, held; when hungry, filled.

This docile child shall unsheathe swords,

shall set to torch this world of things.

Fierce love will leave as scant as words

the dreams of magi and bloody kings.

The cold clear air of Bethlehem

confronted me at break of day.

I shall not see Jerusalem.

My path must turn another way.

Flaneur online

The city if it exists seems stranger than it

once did.  Activity, now digital, 

remains at best an alienated stroll,

and all around the world has turned to shit.

He suffers no fools, gives no fucks.  His hash

tags cut to the quick.  The purity,

the deepness of his feelz are bounded only

by limitations of character and cache.

He is no loner: he's everywhere.  He shows

himself by thoughtful avatar, the blather

he slyly shouts, the righteous nastiness

adroitly cap-locked out into the ether,

the takes on what he does and doesn't know:

all proclamations of nothing to confess.

Far From the Kingdom

(Mark 12: 28-34)

  Not far from the kingdom

            I gave it up, was burned in

            Al Trafar, on the Tigris

            I dodged the IEDs

            didn't waste any civilians

            even when it was hard to tell

            I did my job, mostly well

  Am I not far from the kingdom

            I help out with Habitat houses

            from time to time, give the recommended

            amount to United Way, make dinner

            at the shelter every fourth Thursday

            I give way, I bite my tongue

            all will be well until the payback comes

  To be not far from the kingdom is to be far

            See all these failings and betrayals

            these sacraments of selfishness

            my buddy left to die, could not be helped

            crime scene casings

            dead checks

            where is my peace, my rest

  Is there a kingdom

            The kingdom must be a mirage

            as kingdoms tend to be in this part of the world

            scrub, smoke, infernal uncertainty

            why am I here, what am I to seek

            something to be found

            in inscrutable questions and hostile ground

I will not leave you comfortless

When flower dies upon the sedge,

when worry troubles all your rest,

when death invades the hermitage,

I will not leave you comfortless.

When what you do, if soon or late,

dissolves to shame and dark regret,

the self you love, the self you hate:

I will not leave you comfortless.

When loss comes colored with the part

of friend forgotten, loneliness

transforming mind and heart:

I will not leave you comfortless.

The blackness of the world's arrest

will fly before the true, the best

of love's designing selflessness.

I will not leave you comfortless. 

Notes on Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men"

Yeats' "Byzantium" (from which the novel's title is taken) treats, as I read it, with the tension between the life of the body and the sterile but still somehow unaging life of the intellect, imagination and soul.  Which kind of isn't what McCarthy's book is about.

The spare prose style here (no quotation marks, dialect, many characters unnamed or given only last names, Hemingway-esque sentence structure) points up the rawness of the story: a killer sure as doom, a world without rules, a chain of events that is both implacable and absurd.  There is an objective correlative too, in the hardness and deadliness of the southwest Texas desert country.

We are led to believe that Sheriff Tom Ed Bell is just too old, his belief system too outmoded, to deal with this implacability.  But as the novel unfolds we sense this is not the whole story:  Bell sees himself as never having been the man he thought he should be, and questions whether he ever could have dealt with the negation represented by the soulless killer Anton Chigurgh and the rule-less monolith that is the drug trade.  Bell has seen negation coming all his life, we sense, and part of him has refused to engage and fled.

The sociopath Chigurgh (the unpronounceability of his name a purposeful detail) has no character, is no character, is scarcely human: Nietzschean embodiment of pure will, a living killing bogey man.  His is not just no country for old men, it is a country not for men at all. (An irony in the title by the way:  in a country not for old men, most of the men left standing at the end are old.)  Even Grendel loved his mother-monster; Mr. Hyde was Dr. Jekyll on good days.  Chirugh is just a force, a malignity (like life, if you choose to view it that way).

The novelist and critic Michael Chabon, without any real elaboration, torches "No Country," basically saying that he loves McCarthy despite it.  I suppose one could complain that Bell's monologues (especially at the end, after the action has subsided) are unnecessary and ineffectively didactic.  One could say that the movie is better.  Maybe.  But I say it's still a pretty darn good book. 

Flaneur with bomb

Those suras surging through his mind, he walks

about the city.  He longs to be alone

despite the bustle, and a sine qua non.

You would not understand him.  If he spoke, his talk

would feel to you like grabbing an electric

fence. Why notice him? The crowd’s a veil

that masks itself and covers him as well.

This is where I’ve come.  This place is sick.

I see the scandalous girls, loose and fast.

I see the blasphemy that masquerades as art.

I witness laws that give succor to fiends.

He walks into the arena.  He stops, he leans.

Oh help me (I wil not say your name) to do my part

to blow this city down in one clean blast.

Jefferson the bibliophile

Jefferson amassed multiple substantial libraries during his lifetime. In 1814, after the Congressional book collections were destroyed in the war of 1812, Jefferson sold his personal library to Congress - almost 6,500 volumes.  In the remaining twelve years of his life, he acquired 1,600 volumes at Monticello and another 650 at his retreat in Bedford, VA.

By way of contrast, the clergyman John Harvard donated his library to the college he helped found and that would be named after him - all 400 volumes of it.  Of course, Harvard died at age 31, while Jefferson lived to the ripe old book-collecting age of 83.

Takes Turing Test, Fails

I love you but not your emotional flatness

she said

you don’t react

and it makes me think

you must not care

(the robot, questioning if there could be

an acceptable reply, resolved

that it would dance wildly

at the next ready opportunity)

You try to fix everything

she said

you don’t understand

that some things can’t be fixed

I wonder if you even listen

(the robot began at once

to wonder how to fix itself

while listening more closely)

Sometimes I feel I

just don’t know you at all

she said

(my programmer did not

prepare me for this

thought the robot

I am just

old iron)

Listening to a performance of Marcel Dupre's Le chemin de la Croix (The Stations of the Cross, Op. 29)

I                                    1931, tramp, tramp.  Dupre the Frenchman, Hitler

Jesus is sentenced       bestirs himself from the floor of

to death                        Europe.  We have found ourselves wanting and

                                    will adjudge ourselves the more harshly for it.

                                    tramp, tramp

  II                                   it is not yet beyond saving

Jesus is given               it can still turn out well

His cross                      we do not yet have to go along, not with all of it

                                    “We must bear the cross before it bears us”

                                   III                                 Christ plays in the ten thousand places

Jesus falls                    in this one, too?  The earth is hard as iron

the first time                meant to extract our blood

                                    must this be so?  Human pheromones, save me;

                                    disguise what is coming, hide my inner

                                    self from what is to be

                                    the hard stone of these steps, the hard

                                    word of this cross

                                    death approaches metronomically

                                    all the chambers fill with the grandeur

                                    of death, self-sacrifice

                                    who am I to deny this

  IV                                 across Europe for millenia the stifled

Jesus meets                  wails of mothers for their bloody

his mother                    dying sons – how proud I was of him

                                     how little I knew, how cleanly

                                     this rips my heart, beating, from my chest

  V                                  who is this Cyrenean?  How came he to

Simon of Cyrene         this place?  Whither will he go, after Jesus’

carries the cross           blood has stained his robe and the rough

                                    edge of this wood smoothed across his

                                    shoulder?  God forbid that there not be

                                    a special seat in heaven for he who

                                    deigned to hug that bloody wood

  VI                                 “his image made of blood,

Veronica wipes            his tears, our spit”      

the face of Jesus          the cloth can do little to staunch the flow

                                     of gore, the victim’s heart thundering

                                     wildly.  Behind, the Cyrenean’s forearm

                                     is as bloody as the cross it embraces

  VII                               Middle Passage.  A former king,

Jesus falls                    fastened to a post with a ring

the second time           of iron, falters, disease-ridden

                                    and starving, beaten,

                                    his throat aflame with thirst;

                                    he slumps back into the

                                    slime of his prison, while fast

                                    and thickly staccatoes the lash.

                                    “Lord save us from this second fall”

                                    “If salvation is so hard

                                    what about hell?

                                    If they so treat green wood,

                                    what will they do with the dead?”

  VIII                               the women of the little Polish town

Jesus meets                  would try to see the children through the wire

the daughters              and tried to believe, in their horror,

of Jerusalem                that today was not just business as usual

                                    God’s blessings on those who saw first-hand

                                    the malignity, the coming wreck

  IX                                 third fall – save us from despair

Jesus falls                    in this cacaphony

the third time               grind him the great maw of our machine

                                    break him, break him

  X                                  all is taken but his blood

Jesus is stripped          and they shall soon have that

of his garments            take it – watch the cancer advance

                                    take it – drink yourself to death

                                    take it – as the bomb goes off

  XI                                  here is our hard bed of love

Jesus is nailed              here is our place you coveted

to the cross                  here is the threshing floor of your unworldly love

                                     see your creatures straining with the effort

                                     to bind and kill you

                                     see their effort and see their skill

                                     oh so much more you have to do

                                     to save such as these, as we

                                     who macerate your flesh by the minute

  XII                                If you do not know by now you never will

Jesus dies                    of the barrenness of this vessel -        

on the cross                 a chimera, the promise of life,

                                    of fullness: make the acquaintance

                                    of this death you created for yourself, for me

                                    meet the solitude, the emptiness

                                    of these your slayers

                                    each breath is agony as the body distends

                                    prop yourself up so you can breathe once

                                    more, twice

                                    give up as you have been given up on

  XIII                              I dreamt just moments ago

Jesus’ body                 my son was killed like any criminal

is removed from          pulverized and hung

the cross                      like so much meat

                                    But my boy did not die this way

                                    these wounds did not so badly pain

                                    him, his parting from me was never

                                    such as this.  He is now mine, I care

                                    for him, I wash him with my tears

  XIV                              Hide his wounds in this wound of the earth

Jesus is laid                 the latter lovingly made, the former all

in the tomb                  malice and spite

                                    Clot this gore in gore’s receptacle

                                    give him a place to catch his breath

                                    to pick up speed for breaking through

                                    O powerless death

                                    be then his springboard, his signature

                                    take the broken limbs, the ruptured ligature

                                    the bloody brow, the pierced heart

                                    quietly retire until his healing starts

                                    Give over thy life, O death

Notes on Michael Pollon’s “Cooked”

With Pollon, you know where he stands going in to any book about food or cooking.  That the modern American food chain has become hopelessly disconnected from actual food sources (or what every generation of humans save the last couple would have understood as food sources).  That American society has largely forgotten and lost not just the nutritional benefits of traditional cooking, but other intangible (call them collectively psychic) benefits of the practice as well.  That the wisdom of the old-time farmer and cook is wiser than the knowledge of the modern farming conglomerate, the contemporary nutritional scientist, the food industry chemist, and all manner of modern marketers.  I do not doubt that the case contra Pollon could be made better - Pollon doesn’t even try - but who cares?  Not this reader.  At the end of the day, Pollon is right about all of this, and just about any first world sentient person would probably recognize it.

Where Pollon in his books has tended to display some nerves - and it's true of “Cooked” - is in dealing with the issue of man eating animals.  It bothers him - but he can’t take up the cudgels of traditional cookery without being on the side of the meat eaters.  Indeed, he gives some data here that show, basically, we don’t thrive without some meat in our diet.  Where he probably comes out on this is, yes we can and should eat animals, but we should not abuse or torture them in such service.  This is where the case contra might be pressed, if one were of a mind to: could we have the ready (and cheap) availability of meat we enjoy without modern meat-farming methods?

Pollon’s ethos, though, is such that it of necessity must appeal to traditionalists, no matter what.  A philosophy that says, in essence, eat what your grandparents ate, the way they ate it - could there be a more comfortable philosophy for an instinctive conservative, or anyone who believes in the collective wisdom of forebears?  Set aside all the evolutionary biology that Pollon insists on - who cares if it’s true or not?  It’s idle though highly interesting intellectual speculation whether wheat and corn and pigs and cows and microbes “co-evolved” with humans to our mutual benefit.  The larger point is that our forebears understood how to deal with grains and yeast and meat - to their and our benefit.

But interesting the speculation is.  One of Pollon’s notions is that these cooking methods - the roasting of meat and cooking in pots most particularly - freed homo sapiens from the almost impossible task (for us, given our physiognomy) of chewing and digesting raw meat.  The wood fire became our mandible, the cook pot our stomach.  All of which freed us, hypothesizes Pollon, to spend more time gaining food and less processing it, all in the service of feeding our outsized and energy-consuming brains.

At the end of the day, this is just a happy and encouraging story, really a noble one.  I don’t mean Pollon and his cooking undertakings (though they are pretty admirable).  What is noble here is the loud reminder of what we knew but now are near forgetting, to our great detriment.