Desires of God

“How confidently the desires of God are spoken of! Perhaps God wants something quite different. Or nothing, nothing at all.”

~ Denise Levertov

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Conquest of the Useless

by Chelsea Bauch

Conquest of the Useless chronicles Werner Herzog’s disastrous attempt at shooting his 1982 epic Fitzcarraldo in the Amazon rainforest.

Herzog’s persistence in the face of endless setbacks — cast changes, a border war, environmental complications, the all-but-impossible task of leveraging a steamship over a hillside — is unsurprising from a man who willingly ate his own shoe after losing a bet. The journal offers a candid peek at the audacious spirit and self-referencing paranoia of an acclaimed yet controversial filmmaker.

The book isn’t so much a memoir as a wholesale reprint of the director’s nightmarish account of his failed excursion. In the vein of Terry Gilliam’s Lost in La Mancha, the ill-fated project was also documented by Les Banks for his documentary Burden of Dreams — but unlike the latter film, Conquest reveals the inner struggles and pitiless frustration of the sinking ship’s stubborn captain.

Visit Herzog’s website, brush up on the movie’s history, read Time’s interview with Herzog about the experience, and buy the book.

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DEMONS
May struggled with her own demons. She had a reputation for being at times disagreeable, even destructive with her anger. It could pull her down and alienate people from her. Of this she observed:

"I have to forgive myself to keep on creating and being what I can be. If I dwell too much on my lacks, I simply must become useless to myself and others. That they (demons) are immense and terribly destructive I need not be told, but I believe truly that God has forgiven me a long time ago because he knows what he has laid upon me and that to remain as transparent and vulnerable as I must and to go on creating forever, is all that he can ask."

So May was not separate from the dark side of life. She talked about wickedness as an absolute reality, that each of us battles within ourselves. She wrote in search of sources of strength, such as in this poem:

Letters From Maine -- 6
May Sarton – 1984, age 72

“When a woman feels alone, when the room
Is full of daemons, “ the Nootka tribe
Tells us, “The Old Woman will be there.”
She has come to me over three thousand miles
And what does she have to tell me, troubled
“by phantoms in the night?” Is she really here?
What is the saving word from so deep in the past,
From as deep as the ancient rot of the redwood,
From as deep as the primal bed of the ocean,
From as deep as a woman’s heart sprung open
Again through a hard birth or a hard death?
Here under the shock of love, I am open
To you, Primal Spirit, one with rock and wave,
One with the survivors of flood and fire,
Who have rebuilt their homes a million times,
Who have lost their children and borne them again.
The words I hear are strength, laughter, endurance.
Old woman I meet you deep inside myself.
There in the rootbed of fertility,
World without end, as the legend tells it.
Under the words you are my silence.

And she admonishes us that “the hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering. In her Ware lecture to the UU General Assembly she said her most important concept was that in spite of the baffling state of the world “it is still possible for one human being, with imagination and will, to move mountains. The danger is that we become so overwhelmed by the negative that we cannot act.”

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Listen to what the Spirit is telling us.....

Let Your Works Praise You

Manhattanhenge

From "Faith and Theology"

Lars von Trier's Antichrist

“For what flood of eloquence can suffice to detail the miseries of this life?” —Augustine, City of God, 19.4.

Anthony points to a gripping and eloquent reflection on Lars von Trier’s controversial new film, Antichrist. “Antichrist is very obviously the product of a serious and prolonged depression of frankly theological proportions…. Nature has revealed itself as the relentlessly cruel, profoundly disgusting indifferent monster it always was; human nature is even worse, and women are as disturbed and disturbing as anything a malevolent deity could create in its worst dreams.”

As one of the film’s characters says: “Nature is Satan's church.” I haven’t seen Antichrist yet, but a friend who saw it at Cannes gave it this glowing recommendation: “My God, it’s absolutely brilliant! Pure evil.” You can take that either as a recommendation or a warning...

And speaking of the ambiguities of nature, David Bentley Hart has a new post on the Gnostic turn: “In a sense, a certain ‘Gnostic turn’ is inevitable for us today when we attempt to find our way towards the transcendent, inasmuch as we begin all our spiritual journeys now in a world from which the transcendent has been forcibly expelled, and not as a result of mere cultural prejudice…. We simply cannot now (if we are paying attention) imagine a universe whose grandeurs and mysteries unambiguously lead the reflective mind beyond themselves towards a transcendent order both benign and provident.”

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Happiness Consultants Won’t Stop a Depression

Christ Save Me ! [from my friend Abby] at the Golden Idol Milkshake

and the acid tongued musings of Gore Vidal on whatever....
because they deserve it !
America the Great ... Police State

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"Let your works praise you that we may love you, and let us love you that your works may praise you."
--Augustine, Confessions

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from whiskey river

link

"The important thing about despair is never to give up, never wrap up and put away a sterile life, but somehow keep it open. Because you never can know what's coming; never. That's the great thing about life, the crucial thing to remember. You may beat your fists on a stone wall for years and years, and every consideration of common sense will say it's hopeless, forget it, spare yourself; and then one day your bleeding hand will go through as if the wall were theatrical gauze; you'll be in another realm where birds are singing and love is possible, and you'd have missed it if you'd given up, because it might be only that one day the wall was not stone."

- Allen Wheelis

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Jeez I'm just a mess these days. But I'm getting used to it now and I don't mind it so much....

We are all infatuated with the splendor of space

Photo: Marcin Sacha

"The central feature of the human situation is the existence of the unconscious, the existence of a
reality of which we are unconscious. In Freud's words,

 'The unconscious is the true psychic reality; in its inner nature it is just as much unknown to us as
the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly communicated to us by the data of
consciousness as is the external world by the reports of our sense-organs." 

- N. O. Brown

*

Now enjoy a few gems from the extravagant poet and painter William Blake. 

1. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." 
2. "Exuberance is beauty." 
3. "The lust of the goat is the bounty of God." 
4. "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough."

[Both from "Free Will Astrology"]

**
"We are all infatuated with the splendor of space,  with the grandeur of things of space.  Thing is a
category that lies heavy on our minds,  tyrannizing all our thoughts.  Our imagination tends to mold all
concepts in its image.  In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out
for us:  to what the eyes perceive,  to what the fingers touch.  Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of
substances that occupy space;  even God is conceived by most of us as a thing.

The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing,  as a matter
of fact.  This is obvious in our understanding of time,  which,  being thingless and insubstantial,  appears
to us as if it had no reality.

Indeed,  we know what to do with space but do not know what to do about time,  except to make it
subservient to space.  Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space.  As a result we suffer from
a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face.  Time to us is
sarcasm,  a slick treacherous monster with a jaw like a furnace incinerating every moment of our lives.
Shrinking,  therefore,  from facing time,  we escape for shelter to things of space.  The intentions we are
unable to carry out we deposit in space;  possessions become the symbols of our repressions,  jubilees
of frustrations.  But things of space are not fireproof;  they only add fuel to the flames.  Is the joy of
possession an antidote to the terror of time which grows to be a dread of inevitable death?  Things, 
when magnified,  are forgeries of happiness, they are a threat to our very lives;  we are more harassed
than supported by the Frankensteins of spatial things.

It is impossible for man to shirk the problem of time.  The more we think the more we realize:  we
cannot conquer time through space.   We can only master time in time.

The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information,  but to face sacred moments.
In a religious experience,  for example, it is not a thing that imposes itself on man but a spiritual presence. 
What is retained in the soul is the moment of insight rather than the place where the act came to pass.
A moment of insight is a fortune,  transporting us beyond the confines of measured time.  Spiritual life
begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.

Our intention here is not to deprecate the world of space.  To disparage space and the blessing of
things of space, is to disparage the works of creation,  the works which God beheld and saw "it was good." 
The world cannot be seen exclusively sub specie temporis.  Time and space are interrelated.  To overlook
either of them is to be partially blind.  What we plead against is man's unconditional surrender to space, 
his enslavement to things.  We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; 
it is the moment that lends significance to things.

--The Sabbath
Abraham Joshua Heschel

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‘THE CHILD is father to the man.’ 
How can he be? The words are wild.
Suck any sense from that who can:
‘The child is father to the man.’
No; what the poet did write ran,
‘The man is father to the child.’
‘The child is father to the man!’
How can he be? The words are wild.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
July 28, 1844 – June 8, 1889

Keeping the Channel Open

Merce Cunningham Dies

By Alastair Macaulay

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Merce Cunningham in his company’s studio in the West Village in 2008.

Merce Cunningham, the American choreographer who was among a handful of 20th-century figures to make dance a major art and a major form of theater, died Sunday night. He was 90 and lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Cunningham ranks with Isadora Duncan, Serge Diaghilev, Martha Graham and George Balanchine in making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography, posing a series of “But” and “What if?” questions over a career of nearly seven decades.

He went on doing so almost to the last. Until 1989, when he reached the age of 70, he appeared in every single performance given by his company, Merce Cunningham Dance Company; in 1999, at 80, though frail and holding onto a barre, he danced a duet with Mikhail Baryshnikov at the New York State Theater. And in 2009, even after observing his 90th birthday with the world premiere of the 90-minute “Nearly Ninety,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music he went on choreographing for his dancers, telling people as they went to say farewell to him that he was still creating dances in his head.

In his final years he became almost routinely hailed as the world’s greatest choreographer. For many, he had simply been the greatest living artist since Samuel Beckett.

He had also been a nonpareil dancer. The British ballet teacher Richard Glasstone maintains that the three greatest dancers he ever saw were Fred Astaire, Margot Fonteyn and Mr. Cunningham. He was American modern dance’s equivalent of Nijinsky: the long neck, the animal intensity, the amazing leap. In old age, when he could no longer jump and when his feet were gnarled with arthritis, he remained a rivetingly dramatic performer, capable of many moods.

International fame came to him before national fame. In due course he was acknowledged in America as one of its foremost artists, but for a time his work was known here only in specialist dance, art and music circles. Not so in London, Paris and other cities. There he was widely celebrated as the creator of a new classicism, as Diaghilev’s successor, as one of the most remarkable theater artists of his day.

And it was in Europe that he was most acclaimed right through to this decade, with sold-out Cunningham seasons in Paris at the Théâtre de la Ville or the Opera.

Yet he was always a creature of New York. Close to the founding members of the so-called New York Schools of Music, Painting and Poetry, Mr. Cunningham himself, along with Jerome Robbins and the younger Paul Taylor, led the way to founding what can retrospectively be called the New York School of Dance.

These choreographers both combined and rejected the rival influences of modern dance and ballet, notably the senior choreographers Martha Graham and George Balanchine. They absorbed aspects of ordinary pedestrian movement, the natural world and city life. They tested connections between private subject matter and theatrical expression. And they re-examined the relationship between dance and its sound accompaniment.

With Graham and Balanchine, they made New York the world capital of choreography; and the New York School influenced the world in showing how pure dance could be major theater. Many of the dancers who passed through Mr. Cunningham’s company — notably Mr. Taylor and Karole Armitage — went on to be prestigious choreographers themselves. Many other choreographers, notably Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris, paid tribute to his influence.

With his collaborator and life partner John Cage, Mr. Cunningham’s most celebrated achievement was to have dance and music composed independent of each other. His choreography showed that dance was principally about itself, not music, while often suggesting that it could also be about many other things as well.

A slide show of his life and career is here.

A full obituary is here.

**

"It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it
is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep
it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."

- Martha Graham,
quoted by Agnes de Mille, *Dance to the Piper and Promenade Home*

*
Yes, I know, this is nothing but thy love, O beloved of my heart-
this golden light that dances upon the leaves,
these idle clouds sailing across the sky,
this passing breeze leaving its
coolness upon my forehead.
This morning light has flooded my eyes-
this is thy message to my heart.
Thy face is bent above,
they eyes look down on my eyes,
and my heart has touched thy feet.

-Tagore (Gitanjali #5)

*

 "It gives you nothing back," Cunningham said of dancing. "No manuscripts to store away,
no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold.
Nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive."

Say "Namaste"

Wanderlust had fire-twirlers, stilt-walkers, costumed circus performers, and offbeat events like midnight yoga Twister.

Say Namaste! Party by Night, Downward Dog by Day

By MELENA RYZIK

LAKE TAHOE, Calif. — Beneath a starry sky here on Friday, on a stage underneath a ski lift, Sharon Jones, the powerhouse singer of the funk-soul band the Dap-Kings, was nearly ready to perform. “What I need to do now,” she told the audience, “is loosen my body up, get the blood flowing.”

She had come to the right place. The next afternoon the same stage — and the same quest — was taken up by Shiva Rea, a powerhouse yoga teacher. Accompanied by a live band, she led a class in flowing poses, encouraging many of the same people who had danced along with Ms. Jones to open their heart center and breathe.

The lithe-bodied audience had gathered here for Wanderlust, a new festival that blends indie rock and yoga. From Friday to Sunday, visitors could study self-massage and meditation early each morning and hear groups like Broken Social Scene, Girl Talk and Spoon at night.

The setting — the verdant hills of Squaw Valley, a ski resort, usually empty off-season — provided an almost surreally beautiful natural backdrop. All of the concerts and many of the yoga classes were held outdoors; the main stage for music was 8,200 feet up a mountain, reachable only by gondola. When they weren’t practicing vinyasa poses or singing along to Gillian Welch, festivalgoers in stretchy outfits could shop for recycled clothing or snack on organic melon in a village-style marketplace.

“We want people to leave feeling better than they did when they came, transformed in some positive way,” said Jeff Krasno, a music executive who created the festival with his wife, Schuyler Grant, a yoga teacher. She said their vision was “to incorporate the exuberance and the joy and the fun of a music festival, and the deeper experience of a yoga retreat,” adding: “To go to a three-day fairly hedonistic experience where you’re going to be drinking, probably, and smoking a joint, maybe, and dancing all night, and then do yoga and walk away feeling good, how cool would that be?”

The couple, who live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, programmed the festival to their taste. That meant consciously avoiding spiritual, chanting acts in favor of indie pillars like Andrew Bird and Jenny Lewis. On the yoga side, they booked teachers whom Ms. Grant called “rock stars,” like Ms. Rea, from California, and John Friend, from Texas, who tour regularly. They received headliner billing alongside the bands, and drew just as many attendees.

Mr. Krasno, 38, and Ms. Grant, 39, also envisioned Wanderlust as a way to capitalize on movements that started as subcultures and have now become mainstays, from yoga to indie rock to environmentalism. “Balance” was the weekend’s mantra.

It seems to have worked: more than 4,000 people showed up, Mr. Krasno said, most from the Southwest and California, paying $25 to $165 for tickets to the music or the yoga. About 1,500 of those bought $170 passes that entitled them to experience both: manna to cool-seeking sponsors like Target.

Though it wasn’t quite enough to break even, Mr. Krasno said his partners, which include the companies behind established festivals like Bonnaroo in Tennessee and Austin City Limits in Texas, are already considering expanding Wanderlust next year, to three events on three mountaintops.

Gary Bongiovanni, the editor of the concert industry magazine Pollstar, said the festival organizers had “a great potential for success if they are able to endure the first few years of getting established.”

But let’s pause for a cleansing breath here: can you really party all night and downward dog all day?

“Frankly, when I heard about it,” said Mr. Bird, the singer and multi-instrumentalist who was a headliner on Sunday, “my first reaction was, is that going to work, because some of the bands don’t exactly spell inner peace, musically — nor do I, lyrically.”

He was persuaded to join not because he’s a yoga fanatic (“most of the moves hurt”) but because the festival’s setting provided a distinctive experience, even for a tour veteran. And he figured the audience would be receptive to the show he wanted to play. “It’s a little more ambient, let it wash over you,” he said.

He was right. His set, played on borrowed instruments after his didn’t arrive, got the crowd to hush and listen, even amid the distractions: a lake to skinny-dip in, Frisbee games to join and Hula-Hoops to twirl and twirl.

But the festival was not without some drama. On Friday Michael Franti, the leader of the activist Bay Area band Spearhead, canceled his Saturday headlining slot because of appendicitis. (The organizers put up several banner-size “get well” cards for people to sign. “Michael Franti is ill — not in a good way,” one read.)

The rapper Common was a last-minute replacement; he drew locals but turned off some of the yogis. “He’s hitting on the girls in the front row in the middle of the concert!” one man said on his way out.

And some of the artists didn’t know what to make of the vibe.

“I’m not going to do the hippie dance,” said Kaki King, the Brooklyn-based guitarist and singer who performed early on Saturday on the mountaintop stage. “I’m going to put shoes on and I’m not going to drink any mold” (a reference to kombucha, a fermented tea). And, she continued, “I’m not going to do any yoga.”

Meanwhile, on the stage at the foot of the mountain, Ms. Rea was instructing her students to point their legs aloft and roll their ankles open, “as if you can drink the sky from the souls of your feet.”

There was nothing incongruous about this scene, she said afterward, as she posed for photos with fans. “Polarity is interesting,” she said. “I love to expand the environment of yoga to as many different people as possible, and also get out of the studio.”

Festivalgoers like Genevieve Griesau, 35, a yoga teacher in training who came from Oakland, Calif., agreed. “I like crazy hardcore industrial music and punk rock and kundalini yoga — for a long time, those forces were fighting inside of me,” said Ms. Griesau, who wore a pink Go-Go’s T-shirt and polka-dot leggings. As she grew up, though, she found the common ground; she came to Wanderlust for “Girl Talk and yoga,” she said, and managed to stay up dancing until 2 a.m. and still make an early Ashtanga class.

Gregg Gillis, the mash-up artist who performs as Girl Talk, and whose shows resemble a raunchy spring break party, is about as far removed from peacefulness as possible. But many festivalgoers said they got the same rejuvenating charge from raucous dancing as from mindful breathing.

“These are audiences with open minds,” Mr. Gillis said. “Even if they’re not into it, they’re not there to critique it. And if they like it, they’re not embarrassed to get into it.”

A common reference point for attendees was the Burning Man festival in Nevada. Like it, Wanderlust had fire twirlers, stilt-walkers, costumed circus performers and late-night welding; the after-parties were not as much of a draw as offbeat events like midnight yoga Twister, Mr. Krasno’s pet project. (Ms. Grant, who is five months pregnant with the couple’s third child, won the first round.)

“Can we please never ever go home?” said Megan Miller, 28, a field representative for Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, who drove up — in a fuel-efficient car — with two friends from San Francisco. She practiced her handstand during Mr. Bird’s set and was moved to tears by Mr. Friend’s class.

Perhaps no performer embodied the Wanderlust ethos more than MC Yogi, a San Franciscan who practiced yoga in Adidas shell toes, which didn’t stop him from putting his leg over his shoulder. He beatboxed over the om chant, and with the help of some stilt-walkers, led a parade from an arm-balancing class on Sunday to the stage underneath the gondolas, where he did a yogacentric hip-hop show.

“Say namaste!” he shouted into the mike. “How many of you think Ganesh is fresh?” Lined up on their yoga mats, the members of his audience threw their hands in the air. “We’re going to go old school — 4,000 years back,” MC Yogi promised, with intention. “Y’all ready to shake your asana?”

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Well, this combined with this

"Agape. Something to heal your soul and lift your spirits"........... http://Tikilive.com/recorded/video/21171

leave me feeling really old school.. I feel like a cranky "get off my lawn" old lady. But it kind of makes me laugh. A [young] friend of mine got mad at a teacher teaching yoga "because they're supposed to be spiritual". It's like people getting mad at church, because church is supposed to be different, or the Guru is supposed to be "enlightened". Then we find out that they are just human beings like the rest of us, and we relax a little bit. The Tikilive Agape Church streaming piece made me laugh. It really invites parody, it's like an SNL skit. But I'm glad to see the next generation (version 2.0 ) of hippies are living up to the whackiness of their predecessors.

**
link

"There is an underbelly of terror to all life. It is suffering, it is hurt. Deep within all of us are intense fears that have left few of us whole. Life's terrors haunt us, attack us, leave ugly cuts. To buffer ourselves, we dwell on beauty, we collect things, we fall in love, we desperately try to make something lasting in our lives. We take beauty as the only worthwhile thing in this existence, but it cannot veil cursing, violence, randomness, and injustice.

That is why spiritual progress is slow: not because no one will tell us the secrets, but because we ourselves must overcome sentiment and fear before we can grasp it."
- Deng Ming-Dao

**
A Death on the Barrens

There is a Buddhist joke about a pilgrim seeking enlightenment. He asks his master how long it will take. The master replies: "Ten years."
The pilgrim protests: "No! No! What if I work really hard?"
"Twenty years," the master replies.

– George Grinnell, A Death on the Barrens

*
"We're fools whether we dance or not,
So we might as well dance."
- Japanese proverb

*
Why then, have to be human?
Oh not because happiness exists,
Not out of curiosity . . .
But because being here means so much;
because everything here,
vanishing so quickly, seems to need us,
and strangely keeps calling to us . . . To have been
here, once, completely, even if only once,
to have been at one with the earth –
this is beyond undoing.

– Rainer Maria Rilke
Changing Places

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"On one dark winter day when the wind was blowing violently outside, people were talking in a room. Then, a bird entered the room through one window and flew out of it through another window. Where did the bird come from and where did it go? The people in the room agreed that human life was exactly like that."
- Kitaro Nishida

What profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul ?

FROM Bill Maher on "Real Time" last night:

Friday, July 24, 2009

New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn't do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn't used to define us. But now it's becoming all that we are.

Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations. There are more private contractors in Iraq than American troops, and we pay them generous salaries to do jobs the troops used to do for themselves ­-- like laundry. War is not supposed to turn a profit, but our wars have become boondoggles for weapons manufacturers and connected civilian contractors.

Prisons used to be a non-profit business, too. And for good reason --­ who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition you're going to have trouble with the tenants. But now prisons are big business. A company called the Corrections Corporation of America is on the New York Stock Exchange, which is convenient since that's where all the real crime is happening anyway. The CCA and similar corporations actually lobby Congress for stiffer sentencing laws so they can lock more people up and make more money. That's why America has the world;s largest prison population ­-- because actually rehabilitating people would have a negative impact on the bottom line.

Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it."

But maybe they aren't. Because unlike in Cronkite's day, today's news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That's why it wasn't surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter's time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies.

And finally, there's health care. It wasn't that long ago that when a kid broke his leg playing stickball, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun put a thermometer in his mouth, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle and you were done. The bill was $1.50, plus you got to keep the thermometer.

But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some Wall Street wizard decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're run by some bean counters in a corporate plaza in Charlotte. In the U.S. today, three giant for-profit conglomerates own close to 600 hospitals and other health care facilities. They're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. America's largest hospital chain, HCA, was founded by the family of Bill Frist, who perfectly represents the Republican attitude toward health care: it's not a right, it's a racket. The more people who get sick and need medicine, the higher their profit margins. Which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O.

Because medicine is now for-profit we have things like "recision," where insurance companies hire people to figure out ways to deny you coverage when you get sick, even though you've been paying into your plan for years.

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private health care "soulless vampires making money off human pain." The problem with President Obama's health care plan isn't socialism, it's capitalism.

And if medicine is for profit, and war, and the news, and the penal system, my question is: what's wrong with firemen? Why don't they charge? They must be commies. Oh my God! That explains the red trucks!

Posted by Bill Maher

**
Stringfellow on American leaders

“The … ingenious aggressions of the principalities against human life in society, the victimisation of human beings … by the demonic powers exposes a crucial aspect of the contemporary American social crisis. The American problem is not so simple that it can be attributed to a few – or even many – evil men in high places…. Our men in high places are not exceptionally immoral; they are, on the contrary, quite ordinarily moral. In truth, the conspicuous moral fact about our generals, our industrialists, our scientists, our commercial and political leaders is that they are the most obvious and pathetic prisoners in American society. There is unleashed among the principalities in this society a ruthless, self-proliferating, all-consuming institutional process which assaults … and destroys human life even among, and primarily among, those persons in positions of institutional leadership. They are left with titles but without effectual authority; with the trappings of power, but without control over the institutions they head; in nominal command, but bereft of dominion…. The most poignant victim of the demonic in America today is the so-called leader”

(An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, pp. 88-89).

The Eternal Moment That Love Is Born

from my flickr page

As Once the Winged Energy of Delight

Rainer Maria Rilke

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions...For the god
wants to know himself in you.

Ahead of All Parting, translated by Stephen Mitchell

**

“The eternal moment is outside of time, is not a part of our past or our future, and yet it is lived amidst all our everyday activities. It is in the eternal moment that love is born. Love does not belong to time, and its timeless quality is well known to all lovers. The lover has to learn to still the mind in order to catch the moment and stay true to love’s unfolding. Wayfarers tread a path that lead from illusions of time to the eternal moment that belongs to the soul.

From “Signs of God” by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

**

Christine Valters Paintner

He who has realized that sun and stars and souls do not ramble in a vacuum will keep his heart in readiness for the hour when the world is entranced. For things are not mute: the stillness is full of demands, awaiting the soul to breathe in the mystery that all things exhale in their craving for communion. Out of the world comes the behest to instill into the air a rapturous song for God...

-Abraham Joshua Heschel

**

"Now Hermeticism, the living Hermetic tradition, guards the communal soul of all true culture. I must add: Hermeticists listen to -- and now and then hear -- the beating of the heart of the spiritual life of humanity. They cannot do otherwise than live as guardians of the life and communal soul of religion, science and art. They do not have any privilege in any of these domains; saints, true scientists, and artists of genius are their superiors. But they live for the mystery of the communal heart which beats within all religions, all philosophies, all arts and all sciences -- past, present and future. And inspired by the example of John, the beloved disciple, they do not pretend, and never will pretend, to play a directing role in religion, science, art, in social or political life; but they are constantly attentive so as not to miss any occasion to serve religion, philosophy, science, art, the social and political life of humanity, and to this to infuse the breath of life of their communal soul -- analogous to the administration of the sacrament of Holy Communion."

*

India also has her version of the Hermetic maxim. thus the Vishvasara Tantra states the formula:

"What is here is there. What is not here is nowhere."

*

"Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play; make every yoke that you have accepted easy and every burden that you carry light!"

*

From "Meditations on the Tarot" {anonymous}

*

Somewhere Between Illusion and Imperfect Conception

No Smiting

By PAUL BLOOM

THE EVOLUTION OF GOD

By Robert Wright

God has mellowed. The God that most Americans worship occasionally gets upset about abortion and gay marriage, but he is a softy compared with the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible. That was a warrior God, savagely tribal, deeply insecure about his status and willing to commit mass murder to show off his powers. But at least Yahweh had strong moral views, occasionally enlightened ones, about how the Israelites should behave. His hunter-gatherer ancestors, by contrast, were doofus gods. Morally clueless, they were often yelled at by their people and tended toward quirky obsessions. One thunder god would get mad if people combed their hair during a storm or watched dogs mate.

In his brilliant new book, “The Evolution of God,” Robert Wright tells the story of how God grew up. He starts with the deities of hunter-­gatherer tribes, moves to those of chiefdoms and nations, then on to the polytheism of the early Israelites and the monotheism that followed, and then to the New Testament and the Koran, before finishing off with the modern multinational Gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Wright’s tone is reasoned and careful, even hesitant, throughout, and it is nice to read about issues like the morality of Christ and the meaning of jihad without getting the feeling that you are being shouted at. His views, though, are provocative and controversial. There is something here to annoy almost everyone.

In sharp contrast to many contemporary secularists, Wright is bullish about monotheism. In “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” (2000), he argued that there is a moral direction to human history, that technological growth and expanding global interconnectedness have moved us toward ever more positive and mutually beneficial relationships with others. In “The Evolution of God,” Wright tells a similar story from a religious standpoint, proposing that the increasing goodness of God reflects the increasing goodness of our species. “As the scope of social organization grows, God tends to eventually catch up, drawing a larger expanse of humanity under his protection, or at least a larger expanse of humanity under his toleration.” Wright argues that each of the major Abrahamic faiths has been forced toward moral growth as it found itself interacting with other faiths on a multinational level, and that this expansion of the moral imagination reflects “a higher purpose, a transcendent moral order.”

This sounds pro-religion, but don’t expect Pope Benedict XVI to be quoting from Wright’s book anytime soon. Wright makes it clear that he is tracking people’s conception of the divine, not the divine itself. He describes this as “a good news/bad news joke for traditionalist Christians, Muslims and Jews.” The bad news is that your God was born imperfect. The good news is that he doesn’t really exist.

Wright also denies the specialness of any faith. In his view, there is continuous positive change over time — religious history has a moral direction — but no movement of moral revelation associated with the emergence of Moses, Jesus or Mohammed. Similarly, he argues that it is a waste of time to search for the essence of any of these monotheistic religions — it’s silly, for instance, to ask whether Islam is a “religion of peace.” Like a judge who believes in a living constitution, Wright believes that what matters is the choices that the people make, how the texts are interpreted. Cultural sensibilities shift according to changes in human dynamics, and these shape the God that people worship. For Wright, it is not God who evolves. It is us — God just comes along for the ride.

It is a great ride, though. Wright gives the example of the God of Leviticus, who said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and he points out that this isn’t as enlightened as it may sound, since, at the time, “neighbors” meant actual neighbors, fellow Israelites, not the idol-worshipers in the next town. But still, he argues, this demand encompassed all the tribes of Israel, and was a “moral watershed” that “expanded the circle of brotherhood.” And the disapproval that we now feel when we learn the limited scope of this rule is itself another reason to cheer, since it shows how our moral sensibilities have expanded.

Or consider the modern Sunday School song “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” (“Red and yellow, black and white, / They are precious in his sight.”) Actually, there is no evidence that he loved all of them; if you went back and sang this to the Jesus of the Gospels, he would think you were mad. But in the minds of many of his followers today, this kind of global love is what Christianity means. That certainly looks like moral progress.

But God still has some growing up to do, as Wright makes clear in his careful discussion of contemporary religious hatred. As you would expect, he argues that much of the problem isn’t with the religious texts or teachings themselves, but with the social conditions — the “facts on the ground” — that shape the sort of God we choose to create. “When people see themselves in zero-sum relationship with other people — see their fortunes as inversely correlated with the fortunes of other people, see the dynamic as win-lose — they tend to find a scriptural basis for intolerance or belligerence.” The recipe for salvation, then, is to arrange the world so that its people find themselves (and think of themselves as) interconnected: “When they see the relationship as non-zero-sum — see their fortunes as positively correlated, see the potential for a win-win outcome — they’re more likely to find the tolerant and understanding side of their scriptures.” Change the world, and you change the God.

For Wright, the next evolutionary step is for practitioners of Abrahamic faiths to give up their claim to distinctiveness, and then renounce the specialness of monotheism altogether. In fact, when it comes to expanding the circle of moral consideration, he argues, religions like Buddhism have sometimes “outperformed the Abrahamics.” But this sounds like the death of God, not his evolution. And it clashes with Wright’s own proposal, drawn from work in evolutionary psychology, that we invented religion to satisfy certain intellectual and emotional needs, like the tendency to search for moral causes of natural events and the desire to conform with the people who surround us. These needs haven’t gone away, and the sort of depersonalized and disinterested God that Wright anticipates would satisfy none of them. He is betting that historical forces will trump our basic psychological makeup. I’m not so sure.

Wright tentatively explores another claim, that the history of religion actually affirms “the existence of something you can meaningfully call divinity.” He emphasizes that he is not arguing that you need divine intervention to account for moral improvement, which can be explained by a “mercilessly scientific account” involving the biological evolution of the human mind and the game-theoretic nature of social interaction. But he wonders why the universe is so constituted that moral progress takes place. “If history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, then maybe this growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe — conceivably — the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.”

It is not just moral progress that raises these sorts of issues. I don’t doubt that the explanation for consciousness will arise from the mercilessly scientific account of psychology and neuroscience, but, still, isn’t it neat that the universe is such that it gave rise to conscious beings like you and me? And that these minds — which evolved in a world of plants and birds and rocks and things — have the capacity to transcend this ­everyday world and generate philosophy, theology, art and science?

So I share Wright’s wonder at how nicely everything has turned out. But I don’t see how this constitutes an argument for a divine being. After all, even if we could somehow establish definitively that moral progress exists because the universe was jump-started by a God of Love, this just pushes the problem up one level. We are now stuck with the puzzle of why there exists such a caring God in the first place.

Also, it would be a terribly minimalist God. Wright himself describes it as “somewhere between illusion and imperfect conception.” It won’t answer your prayers, give you advice or smite your enemies. So even if it did exist, we would be left with another good news/bad news situation. The good news is that there would be a divine being. The bad news is that it’s not the one that anyone is looking for.

Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, is the author of “Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human.” His book “How Pleasure Works” will be published next year.

Tend and Befriend

from my flickr set "Anna Ben's Album"

UCLA Study On Friendship Among Women An alternative to fight or flight
©2002 Gale Berkowitz

A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special. They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may do even more.

Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women. It's a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research---most of it on men---upside down. Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible, explains Laura Cousin Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study's authors. It's an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers.

Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight; In fact, says Dr. Klein, it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect. This calming response does not occur in men, says Dr. Klein, because testosterone---which men produce in high levels when they're under stress---seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen, she adds, seems to enhance it.

The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic "aha" moment shared by two women scientists who were talking on e day in a lab at UCLA. There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded, says Dr. Klein. When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something.

The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake: The fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health.

It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the"tend and befriend" notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men. Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. There's no doubt, says Dr. Klein, that friends are helping us live longer.

In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no friends increased their risk of death over a 6-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%.

Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses' Health Study from Harvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friends or confidants was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight.

And that's not all. When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all, those women who had a close friend and confidante were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate. Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? That's a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., co-author of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls' and Women's Friendships (Three Rivers Press, 1998). The following paragraph is, in my opinion, very, very true and something all women should be aware of and NOT put our female friends on the back burners.

Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women, explains Dr. Josselson. We push them right to the back burner. That's really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other. We nurture one another. And we need to have unpressured space in which we can do the special kind of talk that women do when they're with other women. It's a very healing experience.

**
Note: Thanks to Holly !

Fun

Arcanum

Hermeticism is a set of philosophical and religious beliefs^[1] based primarily upon the Hellenistic Egyptian pseudepigraphical writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus who is the representation of the congruence of the Egyptian god Thoth and the Greek Hermes. These beliefs have heavily influenced the Western Esoteric Tradition and were considered to be of great importance during the Renaissance.<sup>[2]

*</sup>
The extant Greek texts dwell upon the oneness and goodness of God, urge purification of the soul, and defend pagan religious practices, such as the veneration of images. Many lost Greek texts, and many of the surviving vulgate books, contained discussions of alchemy clothed in philosophical metaphor. And one text, the Asclepius, lost in Greek but partially preserved in Latin, contained a bloody prophecy of the end of Roman rule in Egypt and the resurgence of pagan Egyptian power.
*

Not all Hermeticists take a religious approach; some consider it to be a philosophical system only. In Hermetic religion the supreme Deity, or Principle, is referred to variously as 'God', 'The All', or 'The One'. Many Hermeticists also align their beliefs and mystical ideas with other religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, mainstream Paganism, or Islam. Many hold that all great religions have equivalent mystical truths at their core, and that all religions share an understanding of esoteric tenets with Hermeticism.

Tobias Churton, scholar of obscure religious movements, states that "the Hermetic tradition was both moderate and flexible, offering a tolerant philosophical religion, a religion of the (omnipresent) mind, a purified perception of God, the cosmos, and the self, and much positive encouragement for the spiritual seeker, all of which the student could take anywhere"^[18].

*

As above, so below

"As Above, So Below" redirects here. For the Klaxons song, see As Above, So Below (song).

The Magician displaying the Hermetic concept of as above, so below.

These words circulate throughout occult and magical circles, and they come from Hermetic texts. The concept was first laid out in The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, in the words "That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above, corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracles of the One Thing"^[19].

In accordance with the various levels of reality: physical, mental, and spiritual, this relates that what happens on any level happens on every other. This is however more often used in the sense of the microcosm and the macrocosm. The microcosm is oneself, and the macrocosm is the universe. The macrocosm is as the microcosm, and vice versa; within each lies the other, and through understanding one (usually the microcosm) you can understand the other^[41].

[Wiki]

**

Spiritus ubi vult spirat:

et vocem ejus audis,

sed nescis unde veniat,

aut quo vadat: sic est omnis,

qui natus est ex spiritu.

(John iii,8)

*
The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.

(John iii,8)

*
Into this happy night in secret, seen of none,
Nor saw I aught,
Without other light or guide,
Save that which in my heart did burn.

(St. John of the Cross)

[from forward to The Magician in "Meditations on the Tarot- A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism"

*
Each chapter is centered around a card from the Major Arcana of the Tarot of Marseilles.

Each card is taken as an "arcanum," which the author defines in part in Letter I: The Magician as "... that which it is necessary to 'know' in order to be fruitful in a given domain of spiritual life. ... a 'ferment' or an 'enzyme' whose presence stimulates the spiritual and the psychic life of man." He writes that they "are neither allegories nor secrets ... [but] authentic symbols ... [which] conceal and reveal their sense at one and the same time according to the depth of meditation." The symbolism of the cards is taken as a springboard for discussing and describing various aspects of Christian spiritual life and growth.

*

"Self is a myriad. We can use the word to cover both our sense of extension over time – the feeling that somehow I'm the same person I was as a child – and for the constantly changing ungraspable flow of consciousness. Which is the true self? That question, the basis for so many Zen koans, immediately leads us astray.

Instead of fully experiencing ourselves in the very act of asking the question, we imagine there's another more real, truer, more essential self hiding somewhere out of sight that we have to go search for. Not surprisingly, we can never find it. But when a problem remains intractable for so long and so many answers that are proposed are so unsatisfying, one must begin to suspect that the question is either being asked in a way that makes it inherently unanswerable or that we are looking for the wrong kind of answer."

- Barry Magid
Ending the Pursuit of Happiness

Leonard Again

'I'm blessed with a certain amnesia'

After his comeback to performing and Hallelujah's unlikely chart domination, Leonard Cohen has had a remarkable year. He talks to Jian Ghomeshi about love, death and taking risks.

Leonard Cohen performs at the Manchester Opera House.

Photograph: Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage

What have you learned from being back on stage?

Leonard Cohen: I learned that it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. I've been grateful that it's going well. You can't ever guarantee that it's going to continue doing well, because there's a component that you really don't command.

What component is that?

LC: Some sort of grace, some sort of luck. It's hard to put your finger on it - you don't really want to put your finger on it. But there is that mysterious component that makes for a memorable evening. You never really know whether you're going to be able to be the person you want to be or that the audience is going to be hospitable to the person that they perceive. So there's so many unknowns and so many mysteries connected - even when you've brought the show to a certain degree of excellence.

In 2001, you said to the Observer that you were at a stage of your life you refer to as the third act. You quoted Tennessee Williams saying: "Life is a fairly well-written play except for the third act." You were 67 when you said that, you're 74 now - does that ring more or less true for you still?

LC: Well, it's well written, the beginning of the third act seems to be very well written. But the end of the third act, of course, is when the hero dies. My friend Irving Layton said about death: it's not death that he's worried about, it's the preliminaries.

Are you worried about the preliminaries?

LC: Sure, every person ought to be.

Let me come back to the beginning of the first act. This was a brand new career for you that started in your 30s. How fearful were you of starting a second career?

LC: I've been generally fearful about everything, so this just fits in with the general sense of anxiety that I always experienced in my early life. When you say I had a career as a writer or a poet, that hardly begins to describe the modesty of the enterprise in Canada at that time - an edition of 200 was considered a bestseller in poems. At a certain point I realised that I'm going to have to buckle down and make a living. I'd written a couple of novels, and they'd been well received, but they'd sold about 3,000 copies. So I really had to do something, and the other thing I knew how to do was play guitar. So I was on my way down to Nashville - I thought maybe I could get a job. I love country music, maybe I'd get a job playing guitar. When I hit New York, I bumped into what later was called the folk-song renaissance. There were people like Dylan and Judy Collins and Joan Baez. And I hadn't heard their work. So that touched me very much. I'd always been writing little songs myself, too, but I never thought there was any marketplace for them.

Some people would think it's ironic to go into music to make money, given that it's not necessarily the most lucrative of professions for most artists.

LC: Yeah, I know. In hindsight it seems to be the height of folly. You had to resolve your economic crisis by becoming a folk singer. And I had not much of a voice. I didn't play that great guitar either. I don't know how these things happen in life - luck has so much to do with success and failure.

People talk about the fact that you've written songs that you've almost grown into as you get older. How did starting a career in your 30s inform what you were writing?

LC: I always had a notion that I had a tiny garden to cultivate. I never thought I was really one of the big guys. And so the work that was in front of me was just to cultivate this tiny corner of the field that I thought I knew something about, which was something to do with self-investigation without self-indulgence. Just pure confession I never felt was really interesting. But confession filtered through a tradition of skill and hard work is interesting to me. So that was my tiny corner, and I just started writing about the things that I thought I knew about or wanted to find out about. That was how it began. I wanted the songs to sound like everybody else's songs.

You say you've always been fearful of everything. When did you give yourself permission to think of yourself as, and call yourself, a legitimate singer and musician?

LC: You cycle through these feelings of anxiety and confidence. If something goes well in one's life, one feels the benefits of the success. When something doesn't go well, one feels remorse. So those activities persist in one's life right to this moment.

Have the women in your life been a source of your strength or weakness?

LC: Good question. It's not a level playing ground for either of us, for either the man or the woman. This is the most challenging activity that humans get into, which is love. You know, where we have the sense that we can't live without love. That life has very little meaning without love. So we're invited into this arena which is a very dangerous arena, where the possibilities of humiliation and failure are ample. So there's no fixed lesson that one can learn, because the heart is always opening and closing, it's always softening and hardening. We're always experiencing joy or sadness. But there are lots of people who've closed down. And there are times in one's life when one has to close down just to regroup.

Are there times when you've lamented the power that women have had over you?

LC: I never looked at it that way. There's times when I've lamented, there's times when I've rejoiced, there's times when I've been deeply indifferent. You run through the whole gamut of experience. And most people have a woman in their heart, most men have a woman in their heart and most women have a man in their heart. There are people that don't. But most of us cherish some sort of dream of surrender. But these are dreams and sometimes they're defeated and sometimes they're manifested.

Do you think love is empowering?

LC: It's a ferocious activity, where you experience defeat and you experience acceptance and you experience exultation. And the affixed idea about it will definitely cause you a great deal of suffering. If you have the feeling that it's going to be an easy ride, you're going to be disappointed. If you have a feeling that it's going to be hell all the way, you may be surprised.

Do you regret not having a lifelong partner?

LC: Non, je ne regrette rien. I'm blessed with a certain amount of amnesia and I really don't remember what went down. I don't review my life that way.

Even in the face of a very successful record that you made in 1992, The Future, do you think dealing with depression was an important part of your creative process?

LC: Well, it was a part of every process. The central activity of my days and nights was dealing with a prevailing sense of anxiety, anguish, distress. A background of anguish that prevailed.

How important was writing to your survival?

LC: It had a number of benefits. One was economic. It was not a luxury for me to write - it was a necessity. These times are very difficult to write in because the slogans are really jamming the airwaves - it's something that goes beyond what has been called political correctness. It's a kind of tyranny of posture. Those ideas are swarming through the air like locusts. And it's difficult for the writer to determine what he really thinks about things. So in my own case I have to write the verse, and then see if it's a slogan or not and then toss it. But I can't toss it until I've worked on it and seen what it really is.

What do you consider your darkest hour?

LC: Well I wouldn't tell you about it if I knew. Even to talk about oneself in a time like this is a kind of unwholesome luxury. I don't think I've had a darkest hour compared to the dark hours that so many people are involved in right now. Large numbers of people are dodging bombs, having their nails pulled out in dungeons, facing starvation, disease. I mean large numbers of people. So I think that we've really got to be circumspect about how seriously we take our own anxieties today.

How much do you reflect upon your own mortality?

LC: You get a sense of it, you know - the body sends a number of messages to you as you get older. So I don't know if it's a matter of reflection, I don't know that implies a kind of peaceful recognition of the situation.

Is there a way to prepare for death?

LC: Like with anything else, there's a certain degree of free will. You put in your best efforts to prepare for anything. There are whole religious and spiritual methodologies that invite you to prepare for death. And you can embark upon them and embrace them and give themselves to you. But I don't think there's any guarantee this could work, because nobody knows what's going to happen in the next moment.

Are you fearful of death?

LC: Everyone has to have a certain amount of anxiety about the conditions of one's death. The actual circumstances, the pain involved, the affect on your heirs. But there's so little that you can do about it. It's best to relegate those concerns to the appropriate compartments of the mind and not let them inform all your activities. We've got to live our lives as if they're not going to end immediately. So we have to live under those - some people might call them illusions.

Let me ask you about Hallelujah, because it's been an interesting year for Hallelujah - it took on a new energy. A song that you wrote in 1984, and it appeared at No 1 and No 2 on the UK charts, and your version was also in the top 40. What did you make of that?

LC: I was happy that the song was being used, of course. There were certain ironic and amusing sidebars, because the record that it came from which was called Various Positions - [a] record Sony wouldn't put out. They didn't think it was good enough. It had songs like Dancing to the End of Love, Hallelujah, If It Be Your Will. So there was a mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart. But I was just reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it, and the reviewer said "Can we please have a moratorium on Hallelujah in movies and television shows?" And I kind of feel the same way. I think it's a good song, but I think too many people sing it.

• This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted for the Canadian broadcaster CBC. Leonard Cohen plays Mercedes Benz World in Weybridge, Surrey, tomorrow, and the Liverpool Arena on Tuesday. Leonard Cohen Live in London is out now on CD and DVD (Sony).

The Unknown Friend

From my flickr photostream

Landscape At The End Of The Century
by Stephen Dunn

The sky in the trees, the trees mixed up
with what's left of heaven, nearby a patch
of daffodils rooted down
where dirt and stones comprise a kind
of night, unmetaphysical, cool as a skeptic's
final sentence. What this scene needs
is a nude absentmindedly sunning herself
on a large rock, thinks the man fed up
with nature, or perhaps a lost tiger,
the maximum amount of wildness a landscape
can bear, but the man knows and fears
his history of tampering with everything,
and besides to anyone who might see him
he's just a figure in a clearing
in a forest in a universe
that is as random as desire itself,
his desire in particular, so much going on
with and without him, moles humping up
the ground near the daffodils, a mockingbird
publishing its cacaphonous anthology,
and those little Calvinists, the ants,
making it all the more difficult
for a person in America
to close his office, skip to the beach.
But what this scene needs are wisteria
and persimmons, thinks the woman
sunning herself absentmindedly on the rock,
a few magnificent words that one
might want to eat if one were a lover
of words, the hell with first principles,
the noon sun on my body, tempered
by a breeze that cannot be doubted.
And as she thinks, she who exists
only in the man's mind, a deer grazes
beyond their knowing, a deer tick riding
its back, and in the gifted air
mosquitos, dragonflies, and tattered
mute angels no one has called upon in years.

**
"Set me as a seal upon your heart,
As a ring upon your arm;
For love is strong as death ...
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
A flame of the Eternal.

(Song of Songs viii, 6-7)

**
Under the combined influence of men's thoughts and aspirations, the universe around us is seen to be knit together and convulsed by a vast movement of convergence. Not only theoretically, but experientially, our modern cosmogony is taking the form of a cosmogenesis... at the term of which we can distinguish a supreme focus of personalising personality...
Just suppose that we identify ( at least in his "natural" aspect) the cosmic Christ of faith with the Omega Point of science: then everything in our outlook is clarified and broadened, and falls into harmony.

(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

**
"When I began drawing the mandalas, however, I saw that everything, all the paths I had been following, all the step I had taken, were leading back to a single point -- namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the centre. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the centre, to individuation... I knew that in finding the mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate. Perhaps someone else knows more, but not I."

(C.G. Jung)

[Quotes from "Meditations on the Tarot - A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism"]
*

Essay On The Personal
by Stephen Dunn

Because finally the personal
is all that matters,
we spend years describing stones,
chairs, abandoned farmhouses—
until we're ready. Always
it's a matter of precision,
what it feels like
to kiss someone or to walk
out the door. How good it was
to practice on stones
which were things we could love
without weeping over. How good
someone else abandoned the farmhouse,
bankrupt and desperate.
Now we can bring a fine edge
to our parents. We can hold hurt
up to the sun for examination.
But just when we think we have it,
the personal goes the way of
belief. What seemed so deep
begins to seem naive, something
that could be trusted
because we hadn't read Plato
or held two contradictory ideas
or women in the same day.
Love, then, becomes an old movie.
Loss seems so common
it belongs to the air,
to breath itself, anyone's.
We're left with style, a particular
way of standing and saying,
the idiosyncratic look
at the frown which means nothing
until we say it does. Years later,
long after we believed it peculiar
to ourselves, we return to love.
We return to everything
strange, inchoate, like living
with someone, like living alone,
settling for the partial, the almost
satisfactory sense of it.

**

Heads Up

pastorfuture on flickr

Follow Me Here

Unruly Teen Charges $23 Quadrillion At Drugstore
Looking Back: Dancing plagues and mass hysteria (The Psychologist.)
What stuntmen think are the best stunt films of all time. (Slate [via walker])
Top 10 Ironic Ads From History

and from
Second Pass

Fired from the Canon

**

I'm taking a couple of days off to visit my sister, who is younger, smarter and more beautiful than I am .

Cheers.:)

pas

War Horse

Making Horses Gallop and Audiences Cry

By PATRICK HEALY

LONDON — On the bare black stage of the New London Theater, a seven-foot-tall horse breaks into a gallop, round and round, until he pauses for a breath, his flanks heaving lightly. A human approaches; the horse, Topthorn, lifts his head, flexes his ears and shakes his tail. His right front hoof paws the floor, as if to charge.

Topthorn is not a real horse, of course, but an intricately constructed puppet in the hit West End play “War Horse.” He and the play’s other main horse puppet, named Joey, are central characters, and they are as much living, breathing and emotionally aware beings as any award-winning actor here today. (The horses’ creators won an Olivier Award for design.)

The play, adapted by Nick Stafford from a novel by Michael Morpurgo, is about a British boy of little means, Albert, who becomes Joey’s owner and best friend, only to lose him when Joey is sold to a British officer to ride into battle in World War I. The loss shatters Albert and leads him to enlist, under-age, so he can fight in Europe as well and maybe find his beloved Joey.

Usury

Op-Ed Columnist

Chutzpah on Steroids

By BOB HERBERT

Washington

What is up with the banks and the rest of the financial industry? The people running this system remind me of gangsters who manage to walk out of the courthouse with a suspended sentence and can’t wait to get back to their nefarious activities.

These malefactors of great wealth (thank you, Teddy) developed hideously destructive credit policies and took insane risks that hurt millions of American families and nearly wrecked the economy. Then they were bailed out with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, money that came from the very people victimized by the industry’s outlandish practices.

Now the industry is fighting against creation of an agency that would protect taxpayers and ordinary consumers from a similarly devastating onslaught in the future. And at the same time they are scrambling to raise credit card interest rates and all manner of exploitive fees to build a brand new superstructure of questionable profits on the backs of the taxpayers who came to their rescue.

We’re reaching a whole new level of chutzpah here.

The Obama administration wants to create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would shield individuals and families from deceptive practices and outright fraud by banks and other businesses offering credit cards, mortgages, home loans and other forms of consumer finance.

Everything we’ve learned in this recession tells us we need such an agency. As Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner described it, “This agency will have only one mission: to protect consumers.”

Protecting the consumer is, of course, anathema to the industry. So it’s preparing for war. The Times’s Edmund Andrews neatly summed up the matter when he wrote that “banks and mortgage lenders are placing top priority on killing” the president’s proposal.

The proposed agency developed from an idea offered some time ago by Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor who currently chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel, which has been monitoring the financial industry bailouts. She is a strong contender to lead the proposed new agency.

Ms. Warren told a Congressional committee last month about the stark difference between the warm and fuzzy advertising approach used by lenders competing for consumer dollars and the treachery that is so often hidden in the fine print.

“Giant lenders compete for business by talking about nominal interest rates, free gifts and warm feelings,” she said, “but the fine print hides the things that really rake in the cash. Today’s business model is about making money through tricks and traps.”

It should be clear by now that it is often the goal of financial institutions to see that the consumer is not well informed. “In the early-1980s,” said Professor Warren, the average credit card contract was about a page long. “Today, it is more than 30 pages. ... I am a contract law professor, and I cannot make out some of the fine print.”

She added, “Study after study shows that credit products are designed in ways that obscure the meaning and trick customers.”

There is nothing free or fair about a market in which one side uses double talk and mumbo jumbo to obscure important information and deliberately dupe the other side into making decisions against its own interests.

When I think of the banking industry fighting to kill this proposed agency, it brings to mind the decades in which tobacco companies insisted that cigarettes were safe, and those days long ago when the auto companies fought against seat belts, and all the dopey arguments that were made against protecting the public from unsafe drugs and kitchen appliances that might burst into flames, and so on.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has concluded that Americans spend approximately $55 billion each year on closing costs that they don’t fully understand. As Ms. Warren noted, “Mortgage lenders furnish reams of unreadable documents shortly before closing, often leaving people with no practical option but to take whatever terms the lender has filled in.”

The family home is the largest purchase most Americans ever make. Paying it off can take much of a lifetime. Everything about that contract should be crystal clear to the buyer.

I had a breakfast interview with Ms. Warren on a variety of subjects last week. On the day of the meeting, USA Today had a front-page article that began: “Even as regulators crack down on abusive mortgage and credit card practices, another type of lending threatens to mire consumers in a credit trap.”

The article detailed the ways in which banks are wringing huge profits from overdraft fees that often are sky high and in many cases are handled in ways that are exploitive, if not predatory.

The malefactors of great wealth view an informed consumer as Public Enemy No. 1. The last thing in the world that they want is a fair marketplace, which is why the Consumer Financial Protection Agency can’t come fast enough.

*

Facing a credit card rate hike? Here’s how to talk it down
Process poses slight risk to credit score, but some experts say it’s still worth a try

By Becky Yerak
If your credit card company has hiked your rate and you can’t pay it off immediately, one option is to call the issuer and ask for a lower rate, particularly if you’ve been a longtime customer.

“Say, ‘I’ve been a customer for X amount of time, and I’m looking at competitive offers,’ ” said Bill Hardekopf, chief executive of LowCards.com, a credit card Web site. ” ‘I’d like you to roll it back to X rate.’ ”

Credit card companies don’t want to lose customers because “the acquisition cost is too high,” he said.

In 2006 the Tribune published a script in a story by Gregory Karp aimed at helping consumers negotiate a lower credit card rate. This reporter successfully used it to bring down the rate on a credit card to 9.99 percent from 24.99 percent.

It goes like this:

You: “Hi. Can you tell me what my current interest rate is?”

Operator: “Your interest rate is X percent.”

You: “Hmmm. I’d like you to lower my interest rate now, please.”

(Don’t say another word until the operator makes a move.)

Operator: “OK, I can lower it to X percent.”

You: “That’s not enough, but I’ll take that for now. Thanks. I’d like to tell your supervisor how helpful you’ve been. Could you pass me over?”

If you’re able to get the supervisor on the line, mention that the operator did indeed help you, but then repeat the script.

In a few months call back and repeat the process.

There is a potential pitfall, according to Bankrate.com: Your FICO score could be dinged if your credit issuer considers that an application for credit and pulls your credit report and score.

“There is a slight risk, but the risk is worth taking if they’re increasing your interest rates so high,” Hardekopf said. “If they’re going from, say, 10 percent to 17 percent, go for it.”

Other tips >>>

**
Wikipedia:

Usury (pronounced /ˈjuːʒəri/, comes from the Medieval Latin usuria, "interest" or "excessive interest", from the Latin usura "interest") originally meant the charging of interest on loans. This would have included charging a fee for the use of money, such as at a bureau de change. After countries legislated to limit the rate of interest on loans, usury came to mean the interest above the lawful rate. In common usage today, the word means the charging of unreasonable or relatively high rates of interest. As such, the term is largely derived from Abrahamic religious principles; Riba is the corresponding Islamic term. The primary focus in this article is on the Christian tradition.

The pivotal change in the English-speaking world seems to have come with the permission to charge interest on lent money: particularly the Act 'In restraint of usury' of Henry VIII in England in 1545 (see book references).

*

The First Council of Nicaea in 325, forbade clergy from engaging in usury^[1](canon 17). At the time "usury" meant simply interest of any kind, and the canon merely forbade the clergy to lend money on interest above one per cent per month. Later ecumenical councils applied this regulation to the laity.^[2][1]

Lateran III decreed that persons who accepted interest on loans could receive neither the sacraments nor Christian burial.^[3] Pope Clement V made the belief in the right to usury a heresy in 1311, and abolished all secular legislation which allowed it.^[4] Pope Sixtus V condemned the practice of charging interest as "detestable to God and man, damned by the sacred canons and contrary to Christian charity."^[4]

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^{MORE >>}

*

It is not enough when a man can say, “Oh, I labor, I have my craft,” or “I have my trade.” That is not enough. But we must see whether it is good and profitable for the common good, and whether his neighbors may fare the better of it.

–John Calvin, Sermons on the Epistle to the Ephesians (sermon on Eph. 4:26-28)(1558)

*

The Spirits

Mongolian Shamans Cure Modern Ills, for a Price

By DAN LEVIN

ULAN BATOR, MONGOLIA — Waving her cigarette impatiently, the shaman declared that she had just the cure for the man’s misfortunes. Two divorces and a business in the dumps? Yes, yes, she had heard it all before. But first she needed another drink.

She watched the man pour out the rest of the bottle’s golden liquid into her bowl and then took a pensive sip. Only then could she administer her instructions, thanks to the fluid’s mystical qualities.

“I could drink vodka, but my spirit prefers beer,” she said. “He’s angry, and always drunk.”

Enkhtuya, 47, who like most Mongolians goes by her given name, proceeded to tell the man to wash with vodka to clear out the bad energy. Then he was to throw slices of horse meat, his wet shirt and vodka into a pot of water and dispose of the concoction far from his home. This, she said, would banish the demon plaguing him.

Additional rituals included keeping salt and sugar in his pockets and pouring out a cup of vodka on his right side every day for a month.

“Don’t spill any of it on your body or the evil spirit will come back and bring more trouble to you,” she warned.

The man thanked her, handing over 1,000 togrog, about 70 cents, and left her tiny shack. He was quickly replaced by an elderly lady, the next in a long line of customers waiting outside.

Enkhtuya is among a growing number of shamans turning an ancient spiritual tradition into a booming business in Mongolia’s rapidly swelling capital, home to about a third of the country’s nearly three million people. Banned for 70 years under Communist rule, shamans are now protected by the state and have become a fixture of city life.

They are in high demand. Thousands of bureaucrats, laid-off factory workers and nomads who lost their flocks in the country’s stumble toward a market economy now crowd faded Soviet-style apartment blocks and tent districts looking for work, love and healing.

“In the old days people asked for rain,” said Chinbat, 30, an electrical engineer who recently finished training to become a shaman. “Today they ask for money.”

This revival, however, is fueling a challenge to age-old notions of spiritual power, as self-styled shamans with their own rituals and lore vie with the more traditional shamanistic authorities for believers’ faith — and cash.

Mongolian shamanism arose from the vast grasslands thousands of years before Buddhism arrived from Tibet in the 16th century. At its heart is a worship of nature and the spirits that rule mountains, rivers and the sky.

Over time, various communities emerged with their own deities, rituals and tools. Some shamans beat drums or play jaw harps to induce trances, while others foam at the mouth and speak in tongues when communing with the spirit world.

Yet deep in their tradition lies the shared belief that shamanistic abilities can be passed down through families, with spirits forcing their chosen oracles onto this spiritual path, often through illness or other personal crises that cannot be explained by science or cured by conventional medicine.

Chinbat discovered his calling during a visit to a shaman who told him that his father’s liver disease was a sign of his mystical destiny. At first he rejected the idea, but after his father died, Chinbat paid 500,000 togrog, or $350, for a week of training along with 11 other students. The sacred drum and robes cost extra. Now he says he can see visions and channel spirits during his vodka-soaked trances. He practices his craft from home and says he keeps these new abilities secret from most people. He also plans to keep his day job.

“The main role of shamanism is to protect your family, not to make money,” he said.

But these days, hundreds of Mongolians claiming to wield shamanistic powers have set up shop in Ulan Bator, where a steady stream of clients suffering from unemployment, illness or heartbreak are just a phone call or taxi ride away.

Claiming to be a shaman can bring prestige, fame and a livelihood, said Matyas Balogh, an assistant professor of Mongolian studies at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest who has studied contemporary Mongolian shamanism. Some of these would-be spiritual healers and mediums invent their own rituals, he said, and are rejected as frauds by shamans who adhere to more traditional practices.

“Neo-shamans have nobody to learn from, so they just make it up,” he said.

Zorigtbaatar Banzar practices his own brand of magic in a round felt tent, or ger, that he calls the Center of Shaman and Eternal Heavenly Sophistication, which sits beside a karaoke bar at one of Ulan Bator’s busiest intersections. A potbellied, red-nosed man in his 50s, Zorigtbaatar says he first discovered his supernatural powers as a young soldier lost in the Gobi and then spent time in a mental hospital, he says, for telling others about his “gifts.”

Today he and his wife, who is also a shaman, have built a successful business based on the worship of Genghis Khan, the legendary Mongolian ruler who they say was the most powerful shaman of all. During their ceremonies, Zorigtbaatar channels Genghis Khan’s spirit for the benefit of the hundreds of believers they see each week.

The work, Zorigtbaatar says, is more important than that of the average shaman.

“We are close to the end of the world,” he said, pointing to a painting of the great Khan surrounded by a divine fire. “Mongolians today have lost their energy, their power, so they are lazy. I am sent by his spirit to help the people, not heal cancer or toothaches.”

Resplendent in a beaded crown and silk caftan draped with amulets, Zorigtbaatar beat his sheepskin drum and chanted incantations before an altar decorated with a stuffed bear head, Mongolian currency and a bottle of Gordon’s gin. Two dozen believers sat nearby clutching offerings of candy and cookies.

Then Zorigtbaatar led the faithful past a large eagle chained to a post and out into the parking lot toward a mound of horse skulls.

Straining to block out the blaring car horns as they focused on his drumming, they murmured prayers for prosperity and flicked drops of vodka into the air.

The ceremony ended with many of the attendees receiving a head massage from Zorigtbaatar before being sent home with a packet of sugar cubes for good luck.

Across town, Suhbat Shagdariin, president of the Golomt Center for Shamanism, an institute dedicated to preserving traditional shamanism, bristles when discussing the competing beliefs that have recently infiltrated Mongolian society, from the likes of Zorigtbaatar to Mormon and Catholic missionaries. Yet even his organization, which has trained more than 1,500 shamans since opening in 1996, has adapted to modernity. Many believers knock on the center’s door seeking financial advice, including two Mongolians who lost a fortune gambling in Las Vegas.

According to Suhbat, the pair returned to Las Vegas and quickly won $2 million applying the predictions of one of the center’s shamans — and a bit of technology.

“The shaman worked here,” Suhbat explained, holding up his cellphone, “but the spirits went there.”

Hugging My Body To Me

---

July 12, 2009

On Poetry

Too Close to Touch

By DAVID ORR

All poets, if they are any good,” Charles Simic has said, “tend to stand apart from their literary age.” The key phrase here, of course, is “if they are any good”; average poets don’t just stand within their age, they compose it. But we sometimes talk as if ­poets are exceptions not simply when they write well, but because they write at all. According to this way of thinking, the art form demands such devotion to one’s individuality that every poet, no matter how lowly, is a kind of outsider — a Cheese Who Stands Alone. This perception frequently finds its way into depictions of poets in popular culture; it also emerges in the vehemence with which poets themselves regularly declare their opposition to labels, categories, schools, allegiances, booster clubs, car pools, intramural softball teams and so on. Yet when everyone is busy standing apart, how is it possible to stand out? What does real independence look like?

Possibly something like the work of Thom Gunn, whose new Selected ­Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $14) is edited by August Kleinzahler. Gunn, who died in 2004, began his career as a hot young poet in England (he published his first book, “Fighting Terms,” when he was only 25) and was generally associated with the taut, plainspoken aesthetic favored by writers like Philip Larkin and Donald Davie. In 1954, he left England for San Francisco, where he eventually settled after studying with Yvor Winters at Stanford. Gunn embraced the city’s bohemian lifestyle — Edmund White called him “the last of the commune dwellers . . . serious and intellectual by day and druggy and sexual by night” — and he grew increasingly interested in syllabics and free verse even as he continued to hone the metrical forms that distinguished his early career. He’s possibly the only poet to have written a halfway decent quintain while on LSD, and he’s certainly one of the few to profess genuine admiration for both Winters (the archformalist) and Allen Ginsberg (the arch . . . well, Allen Ginsberg). This is, even for the poetry world, a pretty odd ­background.

It’s also the kind of background that leads to misleading career narratives. Like most people, poets rarely undergo multiple metamorphoses in their lives and art over a short period. In time, they might shift their style; they might take up different subject matter; they might buy a duplex in Miami. But generally speaking, their existence is reasonably consistent, and they stick fairly close to what they know. Gunn, however, not only moved from England to America, he exchanged the rarefied air of Cambridge for the hothouse of 1960s-era San Francisco, became openly gay, started dabbling in drugs, began writing about the urban underbelly and set about tinkering with the verse techniques that had made him (relatively) famous — all in the space of about 10 years. Critics often attribute changes in a poet’s style to changes in his life; this much change in both arenas threw some readers into what could be described as a tizzy of questionable causation. British reviewers who opposed Gunn’s technical shifts blamed California, just as American critics would, later on, connect his adventurous lifestyle with his more “relaxed” versification. (You can still see this dynamic at work today, whenever critics contrast Gunn’s libido with his tight metrics — as if no one had ever written quatrains about having sex before.) In any case, all of the talk about Gunn’s life and style, and style and life, almost makes one wish the poet had stayed in England; at least then no one could say he wrote seven-syllable lines because of Jefferson Airplane.

Kleinzahler believes that Gunn’s development was steadier and, in some ways, more conventional. He’s right. Gunn began to come into his own with the publication of “My Sad Captains” in 1961, when he was 32, and his work steadily strengthened for the next four decades. In his best, most characteristic writing, Gunn is what you might call a poet of friction: he’s interested in the ways in which surfaces push off, against or into each other. Consider his description of surfing in “From the Wave”:

The mindless heave of which they rode
A fluid shelf
Breaks as they leave it, falls and, slowed,
Loses itself.

Clear, the sheathed bodies slick as seals
Loosen and tingle;
And by the board the bare foot feels
The suck of shingle.

There are many ways to write about surfing — one could focus on the danger, the grace, the speed and so forth. But it’s typical of Gunn that while he gives us a sense of all these elements, he’s drawn to instances of contact: the point at which “the bare foot feels / The suck of shingle”; the moment in which “marbling bodies have become / Half wave, half men, / Grafted it seems by feet of foam.” Feel and touch and pressure are constants throughout this selection, whether it’s the longing of a hawk for “the feel . . . / Of catcher and of caught / Upon your wrist”; the swimmer who remembers “the pull and risk / Of the Pacific’s touch . . . Its cold live sinews tugging at each limb”; or simply the “secure firm dry embrace” of longtime domestic affection.

Even in the AIDS-related elegies that dominate his most famous book, “The Man With Night Sweats,” Gunn is drawn to comparisons involving substance brought to bear on substance. “Still Life,” a poem about a terminal patient, concludes with the image of “the tube his mouth enclosed / In an astonished O.” “The Missing” imagines the vast web of friendships, now vanishing, as a “supple entwinement through the living mass / Which for all that I knew might have no end, / Image of an unlimited embrace.” But the poem that gives “The Man With Night Sweats” its title is perhaps Gunn’s most arresting use of this sort of metaphor. The poem begins with a man waking at night (“I wake up cold, I who / Prospered through dreams of heat”) and recognizing the rising weakness in his once-powerful body. It concludes:

I have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead

Stopped upright where I am
Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,

As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.

The delicate suggestion of alienation, or at least separation, between self and body (“Hugging my body to me”) pre­sages the even greater disruption that occurs in the final couplet. We think of the earth as being our foundation: we’re “on solid ground.” The image of an avalanche is especially disturbing, then, because it suggests that what had supported our bodies is now bent on destroying them. The touch has become a blow; the heat of friction has become a conflagration. Here, Gunn is (consciously or not) rewriting the great American poem of unity between body and earth, Robert Frost’s “To Earthward.” That poem ends: “When stiff and sore and scarred / I take away my hand / From leaning on it hard / In grass and sand, / The hurt is not enough: / I long for weight and strength / To feel the earth as rough / To all my length.” Oh no, says Gunn, you don’t.

One can quibble with some of the ­choices in this volume. Kleinzahler’s version of Gunn is a little more austere than some might like, even when the poems themselves are bent on advertising their ­counter​cultural bona fides. It’s puzzling, for instance, that space was made for a druggy yet prim couplet about, yes, Jefferson Airplane (“The music comes and goes on the wind, / Comes and goes on the brain”), but not for any of Gunn’s epigrams; for instance, the superb “Barren Leaves,” which reads in its entirety: “Spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling: / Wet dreams, wet dreams, in libraries congealing.” Gunn was a very funny poet, and it would have been good to see more of that. But of course, his total output ran well over 500 pages, almost all of which are well worth reading, and any selection was bound to have holes critics would cry over. It’s to the credit of this remarkable writer that those absences seem unimportant beside what is so rousingly present.

*

Lithium Really Is Stardust

On real estate

For a moment I thought Augustine was referring to life in Sydney, when he wrote: “It grieves them more to own a bad house than a bad life, as if it were man’s greatest good to have everything good but himself” (City of God, 3.1).

[Faith and Theology]

*

wood s lot

Photographic notes from a madhouse
photographs and text by
lauren e. simonutti
lens culture

Sequestered in the house that I had made, a madhouse in its own right, only leaving to see the doctor or for food, I am dosed with as much stardust* as a body can take without breaking, trying to balance the threat of organ failure against the redirection of the bio-chemical misfirings that conspire to convince me to destroy all.

(*Lithium really is stardust. It is the 3rd to last element that an exploding star expels before it goes nova. Only hydrogen and helium come after).

lauren e. simonutti

*

Breaking News

Imploring Allah

[both via The Daily Dish]

**

Jesus Plus Nothing

Jesus plus nothing:

Undercover among America's secret theocrats

By Jeffrey Sharlet

And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.

—Matthew 10:36

This is how they pray: a dozen clear-eyed, smooth-skinned “brothers” gathered together in a huddle, arms crossing arms over shoulders like the weave of a cable, leaning in on one another and swaying like the long grass up the hill from the house they share. The house is a handsome, gray, two-story colonial that smells of new carpet and Pine-Sol and aftershave; the men who live there call it Ivanwald. At the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac, quiet but for the buzz of lawn mowers and kids playing foxes-and-hounds in the park across the road, Ivanwald sits as one house among many, clustered together like mushrooms, all devoted, like these men, to the service of Jesus Christ. The men tend every tulip in the cul-de-sac, trim every magnolia, seal every driveway smooth and black as boot leather. And they pray, assembled at the dining table or on their lawn or in the hallway or in the bunk room or on the basketball court, each man's head bowed in humility and swollen with pride (secretly, he thinks) at being counted among such a fine corps for Christ, among men to whom he will open his heart and whom he will remember when he returns to the world not born-again but remade, no longer an individual but part of the Lord's revolution, his will transformed into a weapon for what the young men call “spiritual war.”

“Jeff, will you lead us in prayer?”

Surely, brother. It is April 2002, and I have lived with these men for weeks now, not as a Christian—a term they deride as too narrow for the world they are building in Christ's honor—but as a “believer.” I have shared the brothers' meals and their work and their games. I have been numbered among them and have been given a part in their ministry. I have wrestled with them and showered with them and listened to their stories: I know which man resents his father's fortune and which man succumbed to the flesh of a woman not once but twice and which man dances so well he is afraid of being taken for a fag. I know what it means to be a “brother,” which is to say that I know what it means to be a soldier in the army of God.

“Heavenly Father,” I begin. Then, “O Lord,” but I worry that this doesn't sound intimate enough. I settle on, “Dear Jesus.” “Dear Jesus, just, please, Jesus, let us fight for Your name.”

MORE >>>

The C Street Club

By Scott Horton

What links John Ensign, Mark Sanford, Jim DeMint, Tim Coburn, and a number of other senior Republican leaders on Capitol Hill? It’s a highly secretive religious organization that promotes a radically different view of Christianity, a sort of cult of power. Listen to Harper’s contributing editor Jeff Sharlet discuss The Family–the organization that runs the notorious C Street residence and the subject of his article from 2003 in Harper’s as well as his recent book–last night on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

It is not enough when a man can say, “Oh, I labor, I have my craft,” or “I have my trade.” That is not enough. But we must see whether it is good and profitable for the common good, and whether his neighbors may fare the better of it.

–John Calvin, Sermons on the Epistle to the Ephesians (sermon on Eph. 4:26-28)(1558)

The Generosity of Silence

Qigong group practice


Things to Think

Robert Bly

Think in ways you've never thought before...
When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

Source: Things to Think
inward/outward

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"For Your Birthday"
by John O'Donohue

Blessed be the mind that dreamed the day
The blueprint of your life
Would begin to glow on earth,
Illuminating all the faces and voices
That would arrive to invite
Your soul to growth.

Praised be your father and mother,
Who loved you before you were,
And trusted to call you here
With no idea who you would be.

Blessed be those who have loved you
Into becoming who you were meant to be,
Blessed be those who have crossed your life
With dark gifts of hurt and loss
That have helped to school your mind
In the art of disappointment.

When desolations surrounded you,
Blessed be those who looked for you
And found you, their kind hands
Urgent to open a blue window
In the gray wall formed around you.

Blessed be the gifts you never notice,
Your health, eyes to behold the world,
Thoughts to countenance the unknown,
Memory to harvest vanished days,
Your heart to feel the world's waves,
Your breath to breathe the nourishment
Of distance made intimate by earth.

On the echoing-day of your birth,
May you open the gift of solitude
In order to receive your soul;
Enter the generosity of silence
To hear your hidden heart;
Know the serenity of stillness
To be enfolded anew
By the miracle of your being.

*
"Day and night gifts keep pelting down on us. If we were aware of this, gratefulness would overwhelm us. But we go through life in a daze. A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is; a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep. How much we are missing in life by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them."

- David Steindl-Rast

*

"Attention is love, what we must give
to children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new."

- Marge Piercy
The Art of Blessing the Day

*

Around In Circles

James Estrin/The New York Times

Sister Mary Lou Mitchell, president of the Sisters of St. Joseph congregation, visiting Sister Helen Goschke. “We approach our living and our dying in the same way, with discernment,” Sister Mary Lou said.

Months to Live
Sisters Face Death With Dignity and Reverence

A convent is a world apart, unduplicable. But the Sisters of St. Joseph, a congregation in this Rochester suburb, animate many factors that studies say contribute to successful aging and a gentle death — none of which require this special setting. These include a large social network, intellectual stimulation, continued engagement in life and spiritual beliefs, as well as health care guided by the less-is-more principles of palliative and hospice care — trends that are moving from the fringes to the mainstream.

For the elderly and infirm Roman Catholic sisters here, all of this takes place in a Mother House designed like a secular retirement community for a congregation that is literally dying off, like so many religious orders. On average, one sister dies each month, right here, not in the hospital, because few choose aggressive medical intervention at the end of life, although they are welcome to it if they want.

“We approach our living and our dying in the same way, with discernment,” said Sister Mary Lou Mitchell, the congregation president. “Maybe this is one of the messages we can send to society, by modeling it.”

MORE>>

**

Life After Losing Part of Her Brain

By Tara Parker-Pope

In 1997, Ms. Van Deren had a lobectomy, surgery to remove a part of her temporal lobe that was implicated in a series of frightening grand mal seizures. The surgery cured her epilepsy, but with a cost: she has lost part of her memory and organizational skills. She also has lost sense of time and place, making her a formidable force in a lonely sport that requires participants to endure runs of 100 miles or more.

Since brain surgery, she just runs, uninhibited by the drudgery of time and distance, undeterred by an inability to remember exactly where she is going or how to get back.

This is an amazing tale of science and the human spirit, and gives a glimpse into the challenges and difficult choices people with epilepsy must make to live normal lives. Read the full story, “Brain Surgery Frees a Runner, but Also Raises New Barriers.”

*
Again Dreaming

In a high up apartment at night
Peter and I look out the window and
Prepare to leave.

The city spreads out before us
Distant silent and winking in light.
We are high enough above the city
That we are embraced in
the still darkness of deep night
When sleep cloaks all activity.

Children are asleep behind
closed bedroom doors.
How many and who?
I cannot say.
“What about them ?” I ask.
“What about their fate ?
Should we wake them up at least?
We can’t leave them alone.”

But we can’t take the children
We have to leave them now
and let them sleep.
We have to go
now.

We look out over the city
We look at the lights burning holes in the
dark.
We breath in peacefulness.

Time to go.
We leave everything undisturbed
As it is.

B.S.
dreamed July 5, 2009
written down July 7, 2009

*
From "Follow Me Here"

‘Stoned wallabies make crop circles’

by egelwan

‘Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around “as high as a kite”, a government official has said.

…Rick Rockliff, a spokesman for poppy producer Tasmanian Alkaloids, said the wallaby incursions were not very common, but other animals had also been spotted in the poppy fields acting unusually.

“There have been many stories about sheep that have eaten some of the poppies after harvesting and they all walk around in circles,” he added.’ (BBC )

Breathing Is An Act Of Prayer

from my flickr photostream

BY Mark Jarman
from his collection "Epistles"

God said your name today. He said, "Tell me about X." And everybody had a lie you'd like. The solutions for X were all X + 1. X is charming as a firefly, and know a formula for cold fusion. X's good will is equal to the radius of earth; the fall of the meteorite, the passage of the gritty asteroid, the comet's lonely visit: X notes them all. The biological children of X adore their parent almost as much as the many adopted ones, and all of them are making money close to home. X will donate any duplicate organ for a loved one, and X loves everybody: ask for an eye, a kidney, a lung, a lobe of cerebellum.

And so God, boasting to the devil, said, "Consider my servant X."

*
The following from Nan Merrill's newsletter, "Friends of Silence" July/August 2009
Vol. XXII. No. 7
[snail mail only]

People can live only by dwelling in the living breath of God. Only in this way can they be at peace and realize their aspirations. From sunrise to sunset, they dwell in the living breath of God; every sight and thought is part of that breath. God provides a place for them filled with clarity and bliss and stillness. In the silence, we are moved by this wind, which blows everywhere in the world.

...from THE LOST SUTRAS OF JESUS, ed. by Ray Riegert & Thomas Moore

*
Something inside of me has reached to the place where the world is breathing.

...Kabir

*
Breathing is an act of prayer.

...Frank Waters

*
"From LUMEN CHRISTI, the wording "Nurture yourself with feasts of breath in silence and solitude' blew me away, to put it mildly. Although most mornings I do some breathing exercises, it occurred to me that I had not really paid attention to my breath otherwise in months. Going into meditation, I focused on inhaling Divine Love and exhaling peace and harmony. My mind became like a prism, drawing the energy of the pure white light of Love to a focal point and then refracting it into the colors of peace and harmony and breathing them out to the world... thirty-five minutes in the Silence without distracting thoughts intruding!"
.. in a letter from Anne Amerson, with thanks

*
There are two graces in breathing:
drawing in air and discharging it.
The former constrains, the latter refreshes:
so marvelously is life mixed.
... Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

*
Breathing properly and consciously assumes an attitude of openness and attentiveness. Our breath has a connection with the deeper emotional layers of consciousness. This is evident when we are emotional, angry, or anxious. At the same time, however, our breath remains open to those dimensions of our consciousness where we unfold and become receptive to God ... We need to discipline ourselves to attain an inner stillness and receptive attention toward God, who is our beginning.

...from THE EYE AWARE by Jerome Witkam

**
from Heron Dance interview with Nan Merrill:

Nan: Since 9/11 Friends of Silence has been getting about five new subscribers a week because people are hearing it – people are sharing it because it speaks to them. It softens what’s going on in a very harsh world. And, you know, I tell people about Heron Dance, and it grows that way but it hasn’t reached the 100th monkey stage where it just suddenly wells up.

I helped found The Guild of Spiritual Guidance. Douglas Steer, a prominent Quaker, was another founder. He had been at Vatican II and was very ecumenical. I had never really sat down with Douglas. When I went to the house where he was staying, he greeted me, we sat down and he closed his eyes. So I closed mine. We just sat in silence for about 25 minutes. This was an entirely new experience for me, being invited to see someone and sitting in silence. And then, after about 25 minutes, we spoke for 10 minutes. He gave me a hug afterwards and said, “What a wonderful Meeting.” It was just such a gift. And he said, “Oh, you learn so much about a person in the silence.”

Q: I lived for a while in my teens on a couple different Indian reserves. Old Indians will often walk in to one another’s house without knocking, sit at the table, drink tea or coffee, and leave with almost no words.

Nan: Beautiful.

Q: They’re friends. They’ve known each other since they were babies. I guess they just feel that at a certain point, there’s nothing really to say. You know, you just enjoy the other’s company.

Nan: A lot goes on in the silence. I mean, we speak soul to soul in the silence, and it’s so much deeper than when we verbalize unless we do it out of the silence. When we talk, it comes from the head. But when you can speak out of the silence it brings you into the heart of things, to appropriate action, appropriate talk, because it comes from a deep place.

I have an image that I’ve been playing with lately. The soul of each of us is like a garden and it starts out as fertile soil. We either keep it fertile or it gets filled with weeds or stones or sometimes rocks and brush. And so we’re called -- and it’s usually in the later part of life -- to start noticing that garden within us. All that soil has been planted with seeds by the Spirit. I call ‘em spirit seeds. To nourish them, we need to water it, which is to be nourished by the silence and by the Word, whatever our Word is, with a capital ‘W’. Whether it’s from scripture or from spiritual readings, but we need to keep nourishing that. And it also needs light….in the soil. And so our light is the Light within us, and we have to tend to that Light, to keep the fire of Spirit alive within us by being mindful and living in the Now Light. The warmth of companionship, the warmth of home, the warmth of good nutrition, all are important to that.

You have to nourish the soul within and weed it. It’s not going to happen without personal attention. That comes with being with yourself in solitude and silence. Then those seeds that are your true potential have the room and the nourishment to grow. Finally there is action in the world. You offer your gifts to the world, which you’re doing so beautifully in Heron Dance. You nourish yourself by going out into nature. That’s one our greatest nourishments. And what are we doing to it? We’re ruining it.

Q: Phrases like “letting it go” or “letting go” of whatever, ambition, ego, fear, and accepting – acceptance – those to me are like the big hurdles of my personal journey. On one level I understand all this stuff. On another, I struggle to live it, you know? I operate with the bias that Heron Dance is not going to fail because of a lack of hard work or imagination or creativity. It could well fail. I’m not going to let it fail because of something I should have done that I didn’t do. And that can take me into a frenetic way of living and working that is contrary to wisdom. But on the other hand, I can’t be too critical because I started Heron Dance completely broke with cancer. Things like that dedication to a work can be our greatest asset, and our greatest liability at the same time. We have to work really hard because we make so many mistakes. We’ve got to not only do things right, but also have to overcome all the mistakes.

Nan: That’s a challenge. Life’s challenge. My greatest fear growing up was of abandonment. My father was a traveling salesman. He was gone maybe 3 weeks out of the month. My mother was a very, very fearful person. Both of them had grown up with either various parents or no parents. And so I got this abandonment thing. A big part of my therapy was dealing with the fear of abandonment. And when I went to Detroit, I was introduced to the Prayer of Abandonment from Charles De Foucauld:

Beloved. I abandon myself into your hands.
Do with me what you will.
Whatever You may do, I thank you.
I am ready for all. I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me, and all your creatures.
I wish no more from this, my friend.
Into your hands I abandon my soul.
I offer it to you with all the love of my heart.
For I love you and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands
without reserve, not without boundless confidence.
For you are the heart of my heart.

It’s been the prayer of my heart for over 20 years. It delights me that I have changed from fearing abandonment to choosing to abandon myself. So that liability has been turned into one of the greatest gifts of my life.

What You Had Inside Has Affected Your Outside

from Faith and Theology

blogging as a reading-together

Here’s one more brief excerpt from my paper on blogging – this is from a section entitled “Blogging as a Technology of the Self.”

Blogging is not only a new technology of writing; it’s also a new way of reading. In Christian antiquity, reading was a social activity, not a wholly private one. The earliest recorded incident of silent reading is found in Augustine’s Confessions Augustine relates with astonishment Ambrose’s habit of reading in silence, a practice he had never seen before: “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.”

Centuries later, reading as an oral and auditory social practice still remained the norm. Medieval writers “assumed that their readers would hear rather than simply see the text,” and their texts “repeatedly call upon the audience to ‘lend ears’ to a tale.” Only in the tenth century did reading practices start to become typically silent and solitary; by the modern period, the internalised nature of reading has become entirely self-evident. So that a literary critic like Harold Bloom can now simply define reading as the love of solitude; while George Steiner can argue that the busy sociality of modern life is destroying authentic reading, since “serious reading excludes even one’s intimates.”

In the world of Web 2.0, the ideal of the solitary reader is waning fast. Blogging is a kind of reading-together. It is the formation of a new kind of community of reading. No longer is reading an activity reserved for the private study, that carefully crafted space where thought is cultivated under conditions of silence, leisure, economic privilege. To read a blog is to participate in a collective reading process: on any given day, we all read the same post, the same thread of comments and responses. Such reading is far removed from solitude: the reading is understood primarily as a stimulus to conversation, criticism, discussion. Here, reading is not so much an end in itself as the means to a particular form of community. The very act of reading thus becomes a collective project.

Although I don’t share George Steiner’s cultural pessimism or his investment in the Victorian ideal of leisurely private reading, I think he showed remarkable insight when, as early as 1972, he noted the decline of solitary reading. Young people today, he observed, “read against a musical background or in company. Almost instinctively, they resent the solipsism … implicit in the classic act of reading. They wish to shut no one out from the empathic tide of their consciousness.” All this in 1972: one almost feels as though he was prophesying the existence of blogs!

*
Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore:

Sapere aude!

Have courage to use your own intelligence!


— Immanuel Kant, in “What Is Enlightenment?”, 1784

*
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.
John Ruskin

*
**
"We have to learn to read and write ourselves out of ourselves, and uncurl ourselves back into the world. Language is not a tool for communication that belongs to us. Language is not an exclusively human ability at all. It is a field of meanings and intentions that we inhabit. Human language grows out of the world itself. We speak because the world speaks. And because language and the symbols upon which it depends are the Breath of God, it has the power to penetrate to the very heart of things. Language in the broadest sense is creative because the world was spoken into being. Because of this, reading can be a means of transformation, of gnosis. The reading of the world that we need to learn has to be active and engaged. It must take the form of a dialogue that begins with a careful listening to the voices that speak to us from beyond the bounds of the known. We have to engage in a gentle kind of call and response, a reading that calls in turn for speech, and perhaps for writing, or other kinds of making, and that always turns back to listening."
- David Abram
**
"I am struck by how difficult it is to get back to something we knew to be true once we have been converted, forced by circumstances, or simply denied and turned away from it, to whatever lonely mess we have managed to make since. It is as though the experience of unhappiness is more valid than that of joy. We all know the experience of wanting something badly, only to have it disappear as we approach it. Rarely do we look at the wanting self. My shadowless shadow. We don't cope with much grace, neither the grace of civility, nor the grace of physical being, nor the grace of the spirit. There is at bottom no real distinction between them anyway. Perhaps I am too often absent from my own being."
- Terrance Keenan
St. Nadie in Winter

**
A poet went to see a doctor. He said to him, "I have all kinds of terrible symptoms. I am unhappy and uncomfortable, my hair and my arms and legs are as if tortured. "The doctor replied, "Is it not true that you have not yet given out your latest poetic composition?" "That is true," said the poet. "Very well," said the physician, "be good enough to recite. "He did so, and, at the doctor's orders, said his lines again and again.Then the doctor said, "Stand up, for you are now cured. What you had inside had affected your outside. Now that it is released, you are well again."

—A Sufi Fable

**

Very Funny

Mad TV Bob Newhart Skit with Mo Collins


Sorry, I found this very funny.
It's from Follow Me Here.

Bob Newhart's timing is impeccable. Watch all the way to the end.

Spiritual Understanding Which Is Better Than Political Wisdom

image from my flickr photostream

This was a clipping in a scrapbook kept by my Grandfather.

It says:

July 4, 1948
"Prayer for the U.S"
by Peter Marshall [Chaplain of the Senate]

"O God our Father, we pray that the people of America, who have made such progress in material things, may now seek to grow in spiritual understanding.

For we have improved means, but not improved ends. We have better ways of getting there, but we have no better places to go. We can save more time, but are not making any better use of the time we save.

We need Thy help to do something about the world's true problems -- the problem of lying, which is called propaganda; the problem of selfishness, which is called self-interest; the problem of greed, which is often called profit; the problem of license; disguising itself as liberty; the problem of lust, masquerading as love; the problem of materialism, the hook which is baited with security.

Hear our prayers, O Lord, for the spiritual understanding which is better than political wisdom, that we may see our problems for what they are. This we ask in Jesus' name.

Amen

*
So, in barely a generation, we have gone from this view of Christian counsel to the recommendations and admonitions of the 'religious right.'

My grandfather was a passionate Republican as was my father and most of the people in my tiny hometown. [The town paper, for which my Aunt was a reporter was "The Kane Republican"].

I told my father a couple of years ago that if Ike could see today what had become of the Republican Party , he'd be a Democrat. Dad hung up on me.

Explain to me please the allure of Sarah Palin, the Right-to-Life movement, the current leadership of the Republican Party . The charm of Televangelists, the good sense of the "Prosperity Gospel" , the point of the 'Megachurch' [aside from the obvious one of making piles of money].

The only appeal that I can see is that we have gone as a country to the 'farce' setting and are just looking for a good laugh. Except those who seem caught up in the farce seem to have had their sense of humor extracted. This includes my father, a formerly hilarious human being who then became more and more angry.

It's raining today the day after the 4th of July. No fireworks for us last night, we just got drunk on the back porch and ate fish.

I'll pray the prayer of Peter Marshall for our country. Since time doesn't seem to run backwards, those days of sober, thoughtful men gracing the halls of the Capitol are probably gone for good, and life and especially Public Life will become more and more of a sporting event, filled with the kind of human beings who possess the kind of megalomania and narcissism necessary to survive the constant glare of an equally crazed media.

It struck me, in reading the NYTimes article about Provincetown and Mary Oliver, that all of her work and her poetry are about a tiny tiny place where she has spent her life. Is this how real change takes place, the quiet out of the way places and people, going about their lives and passions with integrity ? In spite of all that I see that would contradict it, my faith remains intact. I can only assume that this has something to do with all that I don't know and can't see. I forget sometimes the part of faith that is "the substance of things hoped for".
[ Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. [Hebrews 11:1]

And there is plenty of evidence of things not seen.

I saw this on "Talking 37th Dream With Rainbow"

"In Tibetan, the word for blessing means "transformation through majesty or power." In short, the meaning of blessing is to bring about, as a result of the experience, a transformation in one's mind for the better."

-- The Dalai Lama

I'm lifting it to share it here because , in this rambling post, I guess what Peter Marshall , my grandfather, my father, the Televangelist and myself share is the desire to bless and be blessed.

Here's to a transformation in one's mind for the better. My mind can always use a little transformation, the same goes for all of us down here on Planet earth as far as I can tell.

*

It Tastes Like Stone, Leaves, Fire

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Blackwater Pond in the Province Lands, near Cape Cod’s tip.

The Land and Words of Mary Oliver, the Bard of Provincetown

By MARY DUENWALD

BY half-past 5 on a morning in early May, the sun rising over Blackwater Pond had already brightened the pine woods. I stood in a wide natural path, carpeted with brown-red needles, that rises up the forested dune from the southwest side of the pond. In the high branches of the pines and beeches and honeysuckles, the birds were carrying on their racket — warblers, goldfinches, woodpeckers, doves and chickadees. But on the sandy ground among the trunks, nothing moved. Perfect stillness. Could this have been where Mary Oliver had seen the deer?

She had written about them in more than one poem, but most famously in “Five A.M. in the Pinewoods”:

I’d seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night

under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I

got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes ...

This is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be. ...

If the deer hadn’t been at this particular spot, they must have been no farther than a mile or two away, because this small patch of earth, a two-mile-long smattering of a dozen or so freshwater ponds on the northwest tip of Cape Cod, is where Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who has a devoted audience, has set most of her poetry since she arrived in Provincetown in the 1960s.

She moved to Provincetown to be with the woman she loved, and to whom she has dedicated her books of poetry, Molly Malone Cook. As Ms. Oliver explained it in “Our World,” a collection of Ms. Cook’s photographs that she published two years after Ms. Cook’s death in 2005, the two of them had met at Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, when both of them were there in the late 1950s visiting Norma Millay, the late poet’s sister, and her husband. “I took one look and fell, hook and tumble,” Ms. Oliver said in “Our World.”

Ms. Cook was drawn to Provincetown, where she ran a gallery and later opened a bookstore, and once Ms. Oliver was there with her, “I too fell in love with the town,” she recalled, “that marvelous convergence of land and water; Mediterranean light; fishermen who made their living by hard and difficult work from frighteningly small boats; and, both residents and sometime visitors, the many artists and writers. ... M. and I decided to stay.”

Before long, she had discovered the Province Lands, 3,500 acres of national parkland tucked away on the other side of Route 6 from Provincetown itself. The tract was named the Province’s Lands in 1691 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony became a royal province as it absorbed Plymouth Colony and the land that had belonged to the Pilgrims (and absorbed Maine as well). This is not the Cape Cod of beaches and sailboats, shops and art galleries, but rather a small, shady and cool wilderness quietly teeming with life — a geological and biological wonder that stands in relative obscurity on the Cape.

“Most people think of Cape Cod as beaches and ocean, but quite a bit of it is forested, and there are all types of different freshwater ponds,” said Robert Cook, a wildlife ecologist for the Cape Cod National Seashore. This part of the Cape is relatively new land. It is made not of glacial moraine, as the rest of Cape Cod is, but of sand that eroded from cliffs farther south and was shaped into parabolic dunes by the Atlantic winds and currents. As this sand settled, ponds were formed in depressions in the dunes, and a rich deciduous forest mixed with stands of pine grew up from the sandy soil.

This is what the Pilgrims beheld in 1620, when they landed at the future site of Provincetown. The ponds and forests of the Province Lands are, Mr. Cook said, a small “undisturbed remnant” of Cape Cod’s ancient past. Ms. Oliver’s poems draw vivid pictures of all manner of life in this tightly contained ecosystem: blacksnakes swimming, foxes running, goldfinches singing, blue herons wading, and lilies that “break open over the dark water.”

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?

**

“People say to me: wouldn’t you like to see Yosemite? The Bay of Fundy? The Brooks Range?” she wrote in “Long Life,” a book of essays. “I smile and answer, ‘Oh yes — sometime,’ and go off to my woods, my ponds, my sun-filled harbor, no more than a blue comma on the map of the world but, to me, the emblem of everything.”

She does give some of her time to the sea, walking along the shore — especially, it seems along Herring Cove, just northwest of Provincetown below the curled top of Cape Cod. She has told in her poetry of picking up an ancient eardrum bone from a pilot whale and has written about the whelks: “always cracked and broken —/clearly they have been traveling/under the sky-blue waves/for a long time.”

*

After a few days in the Province Lands, just before leaving, I stopped back at good old Blackwater Pond. Birdwatchers were quietly making their way along the Beech Forest Trail, stopping to aim their binoculars at orioles and black-throated blue warblers. I sat beside the water under a bunch of pines and opened Ms. Oliver’s “American Primitive” to reread “In Blackwater Woods” and imagine this landscape in other seasons, when “the trees/are turning/their own bodies/into pillars/of light” and “cattails/are bursting and floating away,” part of the cycle of life here that Ms. Oliver has watched so many times. Her appeal to her audience seems especially clear here — her sharp eye, her tugs of emotion as she relates the outer world to a deeper interior experience:

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

The Eye Sees What The Mind Believes

"My instinct as an individualist and artist has always warned me most urgently against this capacity of men for becoming drunk on collective suffering, collective pride, collective hatred, and collective honour. When this morbid exaltation becomes perceptible in a room, a hall, a village, a city, or a country, I grow cold and distrustful; a shudder comes over me, for already, while most of my fellow men are still weeping with rapture and enthusiasm, still cheering and venting protestations of brotherhood, I see blood flowing and cities going up in flames."

--Hermann Hesse


"A stream has welled up, it has become a torrent . . .
It has flooded the universe, it has converged on the temple.
No bank or dam could halt it . . .
All who were thirsty have drunk of it and their thirst has been
quenched,
For the Most High has given them to drink.
By means of the living waters they live for ever.
Alleluia!"
- Odes of Solomon, 6 -

(These Odes are from the first century of Christianity and were
likely sung as hymns.)

*

Humility always has a good cry and then forgets petty insults.


Remember this. If you want to conquer the devil, arm yourself with
humility.'


- Hildegard of Bingen


**
Happy 4th of July !

I missed the neighborhood parade this a.m.

It was a salute to Eagle Scouts and the Military, complete with Black Hawk helicopter hovering over the parade route. I certainly didn't want to miss that.

But in the end, I suppose my ambivalent feeling prevailed and I didn't go, choosing to preserve a little life force, as these mass worship events tend to leave me drained and depressed.

My ancestors were true-believer Republicans. I believe , on the other side of the family were equally loyal Democrats (we're talking , 1800s and turn of the century here). I was raised a good Republican Protestant in the 1950s, and spent most every civic holiday of my girlhood in the cemetery [with the rest of the town folk], mostly dressed up in my girl scout uniform, complete with woolen beret and white gloves [in South Florida], oftimes myself carrying the flag as color guard. The point was to honor "All the boys who died in the war." Meaning, the Second World War. The War. My father and most other fathers were veterans.

I don't think I fully grasped a lot about that war until recently. Ken Burns amazing documentary footage of the Second War [most of it stripped of the stirring flag stuff, most of it sheer carnage, thus unsuitable for viewing until now] in his recent PBS series left me slack jawed at the sheer scale of the conflict and the bloodletting. How could anyone who participated in that ever leave it behind? Impossible. I never knew until two years ago that my father was in the first wave of soldiers to enter Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped. He never mentioned it.

I never saw the point to the Viet Nam war and never supported it. This put me at odds with my family, especially my father, and our relationship never recovered. I tried all my life to understand his viewpoint, but I doubt that he ever lost any sleep pondering mine.

I have a friend who served her entire career in the VA as a psych nurse. She said that there was never a week that went by without a 'Nam vet 'going off' in some fashion in the ER. Lots of stories. My point of view is always this. That human beings are basically good. We are not inherently evil beings. So , when a human being kills, steals, harms another human being, injury is also done to the perpetrator. That this damage is soul destroying. Being harmed by another is evil. But doing harm oneself is a greater evil. This is just how I see it.

I can never whole-heartedly enter into the patriotic love affair with the soldier. Sorry. I know that that is our new societal taboo now, but I feel the same about a propaganda push to adore uncritically any group. The huge push to militarize society, to give lip service to 'supporting the troops' while cutting funding for their medical care and rehabilitation - I just find it a bit too transparent. What are we supporting here ? Is military might truly the best way to win an argument ?

I also find the tangling up of military might and Christianity jarring. Have people not read the Bible ? Have they not grasped the New Testament ? Sorry. I just can't sign on to that. My sons have no interest in joining the military. If they did , I would support their decision to do so.. But they don't. My oldest son said that he sees that some of the military training and discipline would actually do him a lot of good, and is attractive to him. However, he says, he would find it impossible to do work that required him to kill people. Why don't more people feel this caution within themselves ?

These are strange days for this country. We are awash in propaganda's words and images. It's hard to sift through it to find something of substance something of the truth. But I guess it was ever thus. A lot of the constructed images, like the one above are designed to appeal to people who want an easy answer to the problems that we face. The easy answer makes the opponent a demon or a buffoon.

But we're all in this together. Part of the intriguing lore of early Christianity is that it threw together all sorts of people. Rich and poor, insiders and outsiders - it didn't exclude anybody. That was part of the message of the early Church. We're all children of God and inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven. That requires all of us to turn around and embrace those who would normally repel us. What would happen in the world if a 'Christian Nation' actually behaved this way ? Staggering.

So the 4th of July comes round again. My father is gone this year, may our conflicts rest in peace. And may our country face into the difficult work of peacemaking and building a future that sees the best in all of us. May we be true to the spirit of our country's founding. May we forever honor and ponder what the loyal opposition is telling us.

Take some time to read one of the great epic poems of our times, written by a Viet Nam Veteran who has since died from diseases linked to Agent Orange.

*

The Wall Within

Most real men

hanging tough
in their early forties
would like the rest of us to think
they could really handle one more war
and two more women.
But I know better.
You have no more lies to tell.
I have no more dreams to believe.

I have seen it in your face
I am sure you have noticed it
in mine;
at the unutterable,
unalterable truth of our war.

The eye sees
what the mind believes.
And all that I know of war,
all that I have heard of peace,
has me looking over my shoulder
for that one bullet
which still has my name on it--
circling
round and round the globe
waiting and circling
circling and waiting
until I break from cover
and it takes its best, last shot.
In the absence of Time,
the accuracy of guilt is assured.
It is a cosmic marksman.

Since Vietnam,
I have run a zigzag course
across the open fields of America
taking refuge in the inner cities.
From Mac Arthur Park
to Washington Square
from Centennial Park
to DuPont Circle,
on the grassy, urban knolls of America
I have seen an army of combat veterans
hidden among the trees.
Veterans of all our recent wars.
Each a part of the best of his generation.
Waiting in his teeth for peace.

[CLICK TO READ THE ENTIRE POEM]

**

***********************

You can find "The Wall Within" in the book (or cassette) entitled Johnny's Song: Poetry of a Vietnam Veteran by Steve Mason (May 1986).A Bantam Book.

The dedication reads:

"Dedicated
to all of us
who know the true cost
of war
and have paid the price."

Steve Mason died at age 65 on March 25th, 2005 in Ashland, OR of lung cancer from AO exposure. Steve was a decorated Vietnam Veteran, poet, Poet Laureate of the VVA (Vietnam Veterans of America) and spokesman for so many.

Insanity is Genetic, You Get It From Your Kids

Michael Jackson fan vigil

Will the Tragedy of Michael Jackson's Life Be Inherited By His Kids?

*
Answer: Yes.

*

From Fathom Upon Fathom Down

Maria Levitsky :"Ghost"

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits."

— Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.431^[51]

**

How Things Work - Gary Soto

HOW THINGS WORK

Today it's going to cost us twenty dollars
To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,
A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus fare, rosin for your mother's violin.
We're completing our task. The tip I left
For the waitress filters down
Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won't let go
Of a balled sock until there's chicken to eat.
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.
If we buy goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A tip, a small purchase here and there,
And things just keep going. I guess.


--- Gary Soto

From Matthew Kaberline
"We Convince By Our Presence"

*
DYING

The airport is crowded, noisy, frenetic. There are yowling babies, people being paged, the usual ruckus. Outside, a mixture of snow and sleet is coming down. The runways show signs of icing. Flight delays and cancellations are called out over the PA system together with the repeated warning that in view of recent events any luggage left unattended will be immediately impounded. There are more people than usual stepping outside to smoke. the air is blue with it. Once aboard, you peer through the windows for traces of ice on the wings and search the pancaked faces of the flight attendants for anything like the know of anxiety you feel in your own stomach as they run through the customary emergency procedures. The great craft lumbers its way to the take-off position, the jets shrill. As it picks up speed, you count the seconds till you feel liftoff. More than so many, you've heard, means trouble. once airborne, you can hardly see the wings at all through the gray turbulence scudding by. The steep climb is as rough as a Ford pickup. Gradually it starts to even out. the clouds thin a little. Here and there you see tatters of clear air among them. The pilot levels off slightly. Nobody is talking The calm and quiet of it are almost palpable. Suddenly, in a rush of light, you break out of the weather. Beneath you the clouds are a furrowed pasture. Above, no sky in creation was ever bluer.

Possible the last takeoff of all is something like that. When the time finally comes, you're scared stiff to be sure, but maybe by then you're just as glad to leave the whole show behind and get going. In a matter of moments, everything that seemed to matter stops mattering. the slow climb is all there is. The stillness. The clouds. Then the miracle of flight as from fathom upon fathom down you surface suddenly into open sky. The dazzling sun.

Beyond Words by Frederick Buechner


*

My Friends Without Fathers or Houses

My Friends
by W. S. Merwin

My friends without shields walk on the target

It is late the windows are breaking

My friends without shoes leave
What they love
Grief moves among them as a fire among
Its bells
My friends without clocks turn
On the dial they turn
They part

My friends with names like gloves set out
Bare handed as they have lived
And nobody knows them
It is they that lay the wreaths at the milestones it is their
Cups that are found at the wells
And are then chained up

My friends without feet sit by the wall
Nodding to the lame orchestra
Brotherhood it says on the decorations
My friend without eyes sits in the rain smiling
With a nest of salt in his hand

My friends without fathers or houses hear
Doors opening in the darkness
Whose halls announce

Behold the smoke has come home

My friends and I have in common
The present a wax bell in a wax belfry
This message telling of
Metals this
Hunger for the sake of hunger this owl in the heart
And these hands one
For asking one for applause

My friends with nothing leave it behind
In a box
My friends without keys go out from the jails it is night
They take the same road they miss
Each other they invent the same banner in the dark
They ask their way only of sentries too proud to breathe

At dawn the stars on their flag will vanish

The water will turn up their footprints and the day will rise
Like a monument to my
Friends the forgotten

Qi

More Studies Confirm that T'ai Chi and Qigong Heal and Prevent Disease

:: By Karen M. Lynch

Centuries’ worth of anecdotal evidence attests to the medical benefits of qigong and t’ai chi, two closely related Chinese health and fitness practices. And now the clinical evidence Westerners like to see is piling up as well.

What are t'ai chi and qigong?

T’ai chi is better known in the U.S. than qigong is. “But t’ai chi is actually a form of qigong,” says Francesco Garripoli, president of the Qigong Institute and producer of the PBS-aired documentary Qigong: Ancient Chinese Healing for the 21st Century. “It came out of several families of qigong practice — that’s why they go together.”

Both practices look sort of like karate in slow motion. They combine gentle, meditative physical movements and breathing techniques that help stimulate the flow of “qi” (life force or vital energy), promoting better physical, mental and emotional health. For thousands of years, people in China have been practicing qigong (chee-gung) to improve and maintain their health and well-being.

There are thousands of styles of qigong and t'ai chi. Some focus on overall health, but practitioners can also prescribe forms or specific qigong exercises to detox or heal specific organs, muscles or parts of the body. “Some families in China historically would pay a lot of money to some master to get their own qigong forms,” says Garripoli.

These clips from Gaiam qigong and t'ai chi instruction DVDs show these graceful yet powerful practices in motion:

Practitioners tell of the healing power of qigong and t'ai chi

These ancient approaches to fitness and wellness have brought positive health changes to people all over the world. Many have testified that qigong cured them of chronic pain, improved their balance and focus, boosted their immunity, helped them manage stress, fought cancer, lowered blood pressure or relieved insomnia. The New York Times even published an essay recently by a woman claiming qigong helped her regain her health after a stroke.

“I suffer from a lot of headaches, mostly caused by tension in my neck muscles,” says Cathy Bueti, a 39-year-old breast cancer survivor from Brewster, N.Y. "Doing qigong instantly loosens my muscles and helps relieve the headache pain. I also suffer from panic attacks, which increased in frequency after my cancer experience. When I perform the qigong exercises, it makes me feel calm and returns me to the moment, which helps me break out of the panic and anxiety.”

Thousands of studies confirm the medical benefits of chi practices

With so much anecdotal evidence of qigong’s benefits, it’s not surprising that formal studies have been done as well — more than 2,000, according to the Qigong Institute, which maintains a database of such research.

“There is enough research to convince the general public of the benefits of qigong and t’ai chi, validated by systematic reviews of literature on these modalities,” says Dr. Kevin Chen, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine Center for Integrative Medicine.

Highlights of recent studies include:

• A review of clinical trials of t’ai chi and qigong in older adults reported in the March 2009 issue of the Western Journal of Nursing Research notes that qigong improves physical functioning, limits fall risk, alleviates symptoms of depression and anxiety, and lowers blood pressure in older adults. Last year, that same journal reported that qigong improved the physical health of middle-aged women.
• According to the February 2009 issue of The Journal of Nursing, “evidence-based research supports the argument that qigong improves cardiovascular-respiratory function and lipid profile, decreases blood sugar, and relieves anxiety and depression.”
• Meanwhile, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), part of the National Institutes of Health, has funded many studies related to both practices, linking t’ai chi to improved sleep quality in older adults, increased immunity to shingles virus in older adults, and healthy bone mineral density in postmenopausal women.
• Clinical trials are underway investigating the use of t’ai chi for fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis of the knee and rheumatoid arthritis.
• Researchers are studying t’ai chi’s benefits for cancer survivors and patients with bone loss, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and other conditions.

How to choose between qigong and t'ai chi

“Different people like different things. That’s why there are different flavors of ice cream,” says Garripoli. For people who like structure and want to learn a structured sequence of forms, there’s tai chi. It tends to be taught in a committed way over a sequence of time, targeting discipline and focus. For someone who doesn’t have that kind of time commitment and is more health-oriented, there’s qigong. “With qigong, people can take a few classes and walk away with something valuable,” he says.

*

Qigong Institute

Supreme Science Qigong Center

**

Krishna repeates again that it is only by love that man can come to see and know him. It remains true in every mystical tradition that love is the only way to knowledge and union with God. Some traditions, like that of Shankara and Hindu Advaita, and of Thomas Aquinas in Christian tradition, emphasise the aspect of knowledge; yet the great advaitins like Shankara himself, and Ramana Maharshi, wrote poetry of ecstatic beauty in praise of the personal God; others, like Ramunuja of the Vaishnava tradition and St. Bonaventure and the Franciscans in the Christian tradition, emphasise the path of love. But in the ultimate stste one goes beyond all such distinctions and realises being in the fullness of truth alone.

*

Krishna here adds to the ways of love and of knowledge, bhakti and jnana, the way of karma, works done in a sirit of detachment. Finally he adds "love for all creation", though literally it is "freedom from hatred for or enmity towards all creatures". This somewhat weakens the force of the words, but in all genuine mystical experience there is a profound concern for the world as a whole, often implicit rather than explicit."

--River of Compassion

Bede Griffiths

*

These physical practices are profound, and enhanced further by a deepening in the use of them as spiritual practices, or forms of prayer. It is a kind of meditation in motion, the flow of thought, feeling, body, breath in a flow. It's not the mechanics of the practice so much as a tool with which to open a door. Then, it's you that walks through..

Of All Who Will Never Change

Pleased by His Pulitzer, Surprised by Poetry

By Motoko Rich

“It’s always assumed that you’ve planned everything in advance and that it all fell into place,” Merwin said, speaking by telephone from his home in Haiku, Hawaii. “If people are honest, very few gardens are exactly the way they were planned, if they were ever planned. They evolve, just like children grow up.” (And no, he said, the name of his current home does not refer to the three-lined metered Japanese poetry form, but means “break” and “straight up” in Hawaiian.)

He said that he always looked to be taken by surprise — “surprise that it happens at all and surprise that it works and that it’s complete.” After writing several new poems, he continued, “I suddenly think there are quite a few poems and I want to see if they have any relation to each other and begin to see what order they might be in and see if they really come to a collection. I wouldn’t make any rules about how it happens any more than you can do about what makes a birdsong complete or anything else.”

**
Air
by W. S. Merwin

Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.

This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgment
And then winter.

I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.
The rain taking all its roads.
Nowhere.

Young as I am, old as I am,

I forget tomorrow, the blind man.
I forget the life among the buried windows.
The eyes in the curtains.
The wall
Growing through the immortelles.
I forget silence
The owner of the smile.

This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.

*
Wood s lot

W.S. Merwin
with Bill Moyers


BILL MOYERS: You titled this new book, the one that just one the Pulitzer Prize, "In The Shadow of Sirius". Now, Sirius is the dog star. The most luminous star in the sky. Twenty-five times more luminous than the sun. And yet, you write about it's shadow. Something that no one has never seen. Something that's invisible to us. Help me to understand that.

W.S. MERWIN: That's the point. The shadow of Sirius is pure metaphor, pure imagination. But we live in it all the time.

BILL MOYERS: How so?

W.S. MERWIN: We are the shadow of Sirius. There is the other side of-- as we talk to each other, we see the light, and we see these faces, but we know that behind that, there's the other side, which we never know. And that — it's the dark, the unknown side that guides us, and that is part of our lives all the time. It's the mystery. That's always with us, too. And it gives the depth and dimension to the rest of it.

BILL MOYERS: But this is the first poem in the book. Would you read this for us?

W.S. MERWIN: That must be "The Nomad Flute."

You that sang to me once sing to me now
let me hear your long lifted note
survive with me
the star is fading
I can think farther than that but I forget
do you hear me

do you still hear me
does your air
remember you
o breath of morning
night song morning song
I have with me
all that I do not know
I have lost none of it

but I know better now
than to ask you
where you learned that music
where any of it came from
once there were lions in China

I will listen until the flute stops
and the light is old again

BILL MOYERS: "I have with me all that I do not know. I have lost none of it." What — how do you carry with you what you do not know?

W.S. MERWIN: We always do that. I think that poetry and the most valuable things in our lives, and in fact the next sentence, your next question to me, Bill, come out of what we don't know. They don't come out of what we do know. They come out of what we do know, but what we do know doesn't make them. The real source of them is beyond that. It's something we don't know. They arise by themselves. And that's a process that we never understand....(more)

**

Thanks
by W. S. Merwin


Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is