Posted on: October 21, 2008
United Nations building, Geneva
I have been saddened lately by a strong sense of national disharmony. By a screaming, aggressive, desperate atonality. By a discordant barrage of sharps and flats that not only hurt the ear, but the soul. In fact, I think it has never been this bad before, though I do acknowledge that the shrill bombs of hatred and hostility have been with us always. They just seem louder now.
Right now, it feels like it’s never been worse, though undoubtedly in the past it has. Either way, I ponder and am depressed by reality, the waste, the senselessness. The sheer ugliness of the decibels.
Disunity and disharmony is a wrench in the gears of the metropolis and the countryside. Not because we should all be the same — far far from it — but because we are exaggerating our differences and building walls between one another that needlessly make life more difficult.…
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Posted on: October 18, 2008
Emily Dickinson. 1846. Photo by William C. North
[Guest blogger Tony Jones]
Religiophobia
Blindered by heat-flashes
of banality; the sacred barnyard
tells us nothing except it has
no room for us without our becoming
at once greater and smaller.
This is what it means to have
the mind of Christ; to become as a child
with the heart-space of a 1000 goslings,
arrow-tipped with lightning.
One of the reasons it’s hard to write good religious or spiritual verse — and I am well aware that the terms spiritual and religious are not synonyms — is that the “truths” of religion/spirituality are so public — known by millions and millions — of people that to even utter them in their publicly known form is to start from the realm of cliché and banality. This doesn’t mean those truths really are banal, it just means that they have been pounded deep into the wagon-ruts of collective consciousness, where they often lie lifeless, or at least embalmed.…
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Posted on: October 17, 2008
A Children’s Idyll, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. 1900
Spurred on by a thought-provoking blog post by my good friend Tim Brownson, I thought again about what we lose when we grow up. The way we once looked at life. With fresh hope. With a ton of hope and delight. With great expectations and daily excitement. What is it, exactly, about the process of maturation that seems to take so much of that out of us? Is this chemical, biological, spiritual, or all of the above? Do we actually lose special brain cells that are informed with a sense of hope and awe and wonder? Is this an evolutionary process that even makes sense?
I sometimes wonder if we have this backwards. As in, shouldn’t we be more cautious as children and more blown away by the world as adults? Because we see more, we know more, we’ve been to more places, and our senses grow layers and depth, and we can actually appreciate far more about the world in context than we ever could as a child.…
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Posted on: October 15, 2008
Workers in the Snow, by Edvard Munch. 1913
Was thinking again about Anna Akhmatova’s graceful, direct, hit you in the gut poetry. Was also thinking about non-poetic things like economics. I think recent events have made it very clear just how muddy the topic really is. Clear as mud and slush in the morning before rush hour starts. As is my wont at times, I took another look at an old poem of mine in a new context:
Unemployed
He read Akhmatova while he waited in line
No bread line
No line to see prisoners
Starving and cold
He felt something hum in his ear
A soft wind
“Can you describe this?”
Revolutions come and go and the poets sing
With the masses the poor the archetypes
Huddled in clumps on small muddy streets
Facing warm and dry avenues
And white winters on red knees
There were no horses chained to three good wheels
There were no ice sculptures formed by God
Blood protruded from the book
And dripped down on the sidewalk
Heroes!…
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