genesis

The hatred of bloodshed is the beginning of wisdom.

wickedness in the public square

The rhetoric of "99%": bogus, arrogant and evil (because it viciously marginalizes and lies about those it makes into outsiders).  No different than its cousins on the right, the corresponding appropriations of "patriot," "American" and so forth.  I hate no individual, no group, but how I hate mass politics.  Right, left, whatever.  To be clear: mass politics is not the same as democracy.

student loans

I love the American people and count myself among them.  But the great body of the people ever shows its incapacity for self-governance.  Occupy Wall Street rivals even the Tea Party for obvious stupidity, sham, and bovine self-preoccupation.  Fortunately governance continues to come from the elite, who must create an ever more elaborate pantomime of democracy.  It is that necessity to create an ever more convincing show that is weighing us down.  Alas, even the elite must be anchored, and perhaps it is just as well that this be the mode of encumbrance.  It shunts so much malice and vengance away from bloodiness and towards language.  It pacifies, but is costly.

epithet

I think my father's epithet must be:  Father of children, child of God.

abba

One of the pillars of my life is that period of written correspondence between my father and me while I was in college.  We would write great, long letters to one another - thinking through the mysteries, the practicalities, the mechanisms of life.  I do not have these letters, except as digested into me. 

We never planned it - it just happened - and it drew to an easy close as I neared graduation.

As my mind expanded and matured, my father was there, not as physical presence, still less as a guide, but as the most resonant correspondent possible, a loving and joyous fellow traveler.  These letters were the secret backstory of my successful entry into adulthood, and of my time at St. John's.  The warmth, the thoughtfulness, the loving wisdom and playful theorizing we drew out from each other!  They were a beautiful flowering of my father's peculiar genius for being a father.  The greatest blessing of my upbringing was that: my father had a genius, and it was not for work, nor pleasure, nor even exactly for being a husband - it was and is for being a father.  My relationship to him was and is through his most exceptional facet.

We were each in a sort of prime then: he of early maturation, I of new adulthood.  I think we are each in a more foolish stage at present - productive middle passages where the deeper faculties wait: his for retirement, mine for maturation.

Someday we will resume our correspondence, and in the same way, resume ourselves.

old

It doesn't do to be too frank about what a burden we all are to one another.

regal

The motivating power of ideals and illusions are well known.  Why do these motivate better than realities?  Answer: when they are stark, realities motivate just as well as ideas, but realities are rarely stark.  Artifices may be made simple and stark.  That is one why self-projection has value.  One may make one's self motivating by simplified projection.  Others may do the same with their image of you, and this is what your loved ones do - they simplify you into lovability - but most will not love you until you are idealized, and this is likely only if you take the first steps yourself.

years ago

He turned to me at the bar, and talked to me until his beer went warm in his hand.  A mama's boy, finishing college, majoring in zoology.  He wanted to be an elephant keeper at the San Diego Zoo.  That was the only thing he wanted, all he had wanted since he was a child.  He wanted it with the simplicity of a saint's faith.  I probed, conversationally: Was there any possibility the job would not be all he hoped?  None.  What if he couldn't get the elephant-keeping job at the San Diego Zoo?  He would, but he allowed that there were a few other zoos he could imagine working at.  Already he was keeping exotic livestock behind his mother's trailer.  And what if even those jobs were not available?  He would have this job, period - he was absolute.  I marveled.  He gave off the scent of cedar chips, and ever since they have been to me the smell of his beautiful fanaticism.

bowing

Passing at 5am in a cab by a diner, I see a drunkard, not so old or far gone, beg from a bus boy, neither young nor instantly dismissive, coming off his shift. 

The drunkard stretches his begging arms out in front of him, at a low angle, close together.  Please, he gestures.  The bus boy exchanges a few words.  The drunkard points with his whole right arm horizontal; and then makes large, arcing circles with his hands, from him mouth to his belly.  Over there; listen to what happened.  The bus boy detaches and walks on.  The drunkard follows for a few paces, bowing and scraping, still talking.  And then, seeing he is getting nothing, straightens up, turns, heaves his shoulders, and walks away.  All this time, the drunkard has had an orange, hanging in a plastic bag he's knotted onto the front belt loop of his jeans.  The orange swings in the bag as he walks away, like a sight gag, like truck nuts.  The light turns green and my cab drives on.

His gestures were each that of the silent movie pantomime.  Where did they come from?  Partly he is imitating - imitating from childhood, imitating movies, even imitating other drunks he's seen.  A little of it is the shift to major muscle groups that anyone makes when alcohol impairs fine motor control.  But mostly, it is a combination of that innate to us, and the physical interpretation of basic words.

But to see the naturalness of that bowing, the crooking at the hips as the drunkard made his last try!  This is real bowing, the kind that comes from the heart and says damn it I want something from you!

heat

In terms of taste, what is trash, really, and what is its place?  It is that, and so placed, as to destabilize just such questions.

infrared

The good horse balks
At something sensed;
So rider knows it too.
An animal connecting
The thing, perception, you.

The eyes glance round and
Will would press on but
Wait for confirmation.
You know this horse is true,
Senses something here.

The small hairs raise,
Ganglia flash and small breaths
Through the nose
Smell nothing.

But by your steed,
You know danger is nigh.

You hold your reigns and
Pace slow
And arrive
By instrumentation.

Missa Solemnis

Listening to the London Symphony and their choir last night, something about Beethoven became clear to me: that he is serious about degree of loudness as a scale, as a compositional dimension.  I realized this after becoming frustrated with it.  If loudness is a secondary or crude quality of music - and it usually is - then Beethoven's constant alterations in loudness come across as a cheap trick, overwrought, or just ugly.  But Beethoven means to treat loudness more seriously, more dynamically, and if you can make that shift as a listener, the beauty and craft are there to hear. What we do now with reprocessing of sound - of electronic manipulation - is a further elaboration of the same.

rust

Let sureness like beauty
Draw all eyes to
Virtue and power,
That in unity
Ring as bell and tongue
To tell all drawn
That truth like dew
Is pure and new
But burning ever,
Into rust of light.

owing

Society is constructed of many elements, but the chief elements are few: debt, reproduction, optimism, limits, honor, fear and love - on an instant's thought, these come to mind.

welcome

I love that my undergraduate college had an open admissions policy.  But it sure shows in the quality of graduates produced.  Remember that input is the better part of output.

Doug the Ford Spokespuppet

Tunionaire.  Great moments in comedy.

depending from the lining

You know the trope from old television where the shady man, brim of his hat turned down low, opens one breast of his trenchcoat to reveal obviously stolen goods and says You wanna buy a watch?

I saw this today.  I'm in a cab to work, 5am, and the driver stops at a light in Queens.  Prime taxi location: on one side, a gas station with a taxi at every pump, fueling up for the morning shift.  On the other side, a dark sidewalk and a stocky guy in a heavy parka (it's warm out), wearing sunglasses (it's dark out).  With one hand, he opens his parka, and there, faintly glowing, is a Garmin nüvi GPS, clipped to the interior pocket.  He makes eye contact with my driver and with his other hand, points out the GPS.  In a second, it's over.  No deal.

I say he pointed, but really he used that shallow cupping gesture a model on a game show uses to emphasize a small-sized prize.  A year's supply of Dawn dishwashing liquid.  Back to you, Bob.

gazing

I read this morning that there are more birdwatchers than classical music concert goers in this country.  I suppose that makes sense.  Birdwatching costs less, is less well defined, more widely available and the optic nerve is bigger.

Burma

The greatest of all historical precursors to political freedom is having been a British colony. Objectively speaking, there is no greater modern national blessing than that, for a country not actually in Europe.

immaculate conception not required

It is of crass things that true virtue is often born.  In the public arena, false virtue can give birth to true virtue when fertilized by little more than ambition and honor-seeking. John Adams believed that, and so do I.

To put it a touch more fully, history teaches me that the birth of civic virtue is a rare thing, but can result when, all together, merchants seek opportunity, political leaders seek approbation, and there is some form of national discourse about right and wrong. The latter is and must be objectively weakest, but even a little will suffice.

formation

What makes my mother happy these days is clearing a path.  When I was eleven and twelve, clearing paths made me happiest, too.  Paths through the wood, or two paths, meeting at the brambles, passing the lovely stump, with its crumbling interior forming a pool for rain water.  Saw and pruning shears, hoe and rake.  Birds and rabbits, snakes and ivy.

on his shoulder

Probably the saddest of sentences, if only you know it's context: "Am I standing straight enough, uncle?"