Staight Edge Hospitality Suite

e-ew!

2011-10-13T06:37:00.001-07:00

Be patient with those appear to be electronically elsewhere with their thumbs and ears out of the present moment, as being fully present in any moment with the things and people before your face requires great discipline and desire, and I don't know how many people exercise it, and how often. The electronic devices just make the human tendency more evident. On the other hand, to expand one's concern directly and constantly with people elsewhere may be an expression of divine desire.

one line xxix

2011-10-13T06:26:00.001-07:00

Meanwhile, it would be nice to have a nicewhile.

two lines i

2011-09-27T07:49:00.000-07:00

Let us not speak of losing control of people, but of losing our intervening love for them. Helping others do right is not a matter of compulsion and extortion, but of compassion and confidence; at once staying close and letting go.

one line xxiv

2011-08-31T06:29:00.001-07:00

If you are feeling incredibly altruistic, you will care about what people think, because it reflects the nature of their suffering, and you will know how to show them compassion.

one line xxiii

2011-08-31T06:28:00.001-07:00

In maturing, many humans lose their innocence, but none lose their vulnerability.

one line xxii

2011-08-26T05:50:00.001-07:00

maybe less attention to what you weigh and more to helping others on their way; less attention to what you eat and more to who and how you nourish

one line xxi

2011-08-25T07:51:00.004-07:00

and try living in the present, really the present, speaking and thinking only of and to the persons directly in front of you

one line xx

2011-08-25T07:51:00.003-07:00

try living like there's no yesterday; begin by honestly letting go of other people's past mistakes

one line ixx

2011-08-25T07:43:00.001-07:00

imagine Pascal's wager

a few lines i

2011-08-10T06:11:00.001-07:00

Maybe confidence is less a matter of concerning yourself with what others think of you and more a matter of what you think of others; less a matter of how you look as how you see; less a matter of how you feel as how you touch.

one line xviii

2011-08-03T07:55:00.001-07:00

One of the most troublesome hangups is to have hangups about other people's hangups.

unpolished unpolished post i

2011-07-29T08:57:00.001-07:00

Maybe we should speak more of a strong "love ethic" and less of a strong "work ethic."

Some weeks before my father died he expressed an anxiousness or sadness--I don't know quite the word--that he wasn't--I forget the word he used--useful? When someone consoled that he had done so much already, his response was that this was the past; he wanted to be "doing" at that point. I don't remember the exact discussion--this is the spirit of it though. Similarly, after my father passed, Hannah was crying one night because she missed him. I made some comment to the effect that he was really fun before she knew him; her response was that he was already fun. Hannah had the right idea: she was appreciating him for what he was at that point in time.

What am I driving at? I'm trying to universalize from these exchanges. One thing I'm thinking is that while working hard may at some points be what is called for, it is not the essence of what we are or what we owe each other. I think we should teach the value of work and appreciate the work people do (and let them know it), but we should also teach a reflectiveness about work and its motivations and limits. We should also extend the idea of what constitutes work (probably I need to read in Kierkegaard's Works of Love again). It is also helpful to remember what one my professors, Peter Sorenson said: sometimes we praise certain traits as "good" whereas they are really neutral and can be used for good OR ill; and I feel that work is one of them. Also, when we appreciate people's work, do we appreciate it for what it yields us personally, or for more altruistic, universal reasons reasons?...

um, time to stop talking about work and love and time to go do some chores, hopefully with love :)

one line xvii

2011-07-22T10:19:00.000-07:00

Lovely irony, that cheerfully mastering the art of negative capability (see Keats, of course) will make you a most positive person.

enough suffering

2011-07-19T06:25:00.001-07:00

If life were likened unto a marathon, we would not call the stress of running the race a hardship or tragedy; it would be called a feat of skill and endurance; something runners would seek--and in the case of prestigious races--be honored to qualify for. I must hold that life is "the good race."

Now, there are things that happen or could happen in a race that would be classified as suffering, such as if spectators were throwing objects at the runners, or if the runners were feeling angry toward each other . . . Naguib Mahfouz (Egyptian writer and Nobel Prize laureate) spoke once of "artificial tragedies of man's own making, such as ignorance, poverty, exploitation, violence, brutality, etc. . . . tragedies that can be remedied."

In 1985 Gordon B. Hinckley made a statement that holds out to me the possibility of remedying artificial tragedies rather than resigning ourselves that this is the way things are: "We live in a world where peace exists only by reason of a balance of terror. I have often thought that if great numbers of the women of all nations were to unite and lift their voices in the cause of peace, there would develop a worldwide will for peace which could save our civilization and avoid untold suffering, misery, plague, starvation, and the death of millions" (Ensign November 1985).

Three Lines III

2011-07-18T16:10:00.001-07:00

You may find after consideration that you will pay a heavy price if you fail to pay the price.
Given the inevitability of stress, choose the stress that will yield the best results.
(See also Pascal's wager.)

three lines ii

2011-07-13T19:41:00.001-07:00

Oh, the pretentiousness of intentional unpretentiousness. Oh, those movie titles that feature gerunds or past participles. Oh, those who make a point of critiquing other people's language, as I do here.

one line xvi

2011-07-11T06:43:00.000-07:00

I'll be happy when I stop saying "I'll happy when . . ."

three lines i

2011-07-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

To hold an opinion with a keen and intentional awareness that it is counter to popular opinion is to be influenced by popular opinion. To say you don't care what people think is another form of caring about what people think. The key is to be and think without contentious reference to a demonized other.

one line xv

2011-06-24T06:05:00.000-07:00

Be as candid as you are compassionate, honest as you are generous, and bold as you are unassuming and you will have communicated; not all that was on your mind, perhaps, but all that was needful to say.

one line xiv

2011-06-23T06:38:00.001-07:00

The strongest part of any argument should be our compassionate intentions for making it.

one line xiii

2011-06-21T07:23:00.001-07:00

It is a great virtue to take pure pleasure in small things. It can create disproportionate suffering to be attached to those same small things.

imagined dialogue ii

2011-06-11T05:15:00.003-07:00

--Quit snapping at people.
--You told me to snap out of it, didn't you?

imagined dialogue i

2011-06-10T16:29:00.001-07:00

--I need help.
--What kind of help?
--Help to see that I have all the help I need.

one line xii

2011-06-10T10:24:00.000-07:00

When we wager with love, respect replaces fear and confidence replaces arrogance.

one line xi

2011-06-10T09:09:00.001-07:00

Regarding my faith, the only apology I wish to make is that I do not live it as well as I should.

one line x

2011-06-08T08:22:00.000-07:00

Above all, do not be offended by the suffering of other people.

Didactic Poem #8

2011-06-04T20:37:00.000-07:00

See the splendor
and the suffering--
look for the good that is
and the good you must do.

two lines i

2011-06-04T12:00:00.001-07:00

I used to roll my eyes

feel the fear in my enemies' dice . . .

one line ix

2011-05-31T13:10:00.000-07:00

When it comes to conflagrations of the soul, I have little use for contemplative firefighting.

one line viii

2011-05-30T16:48:00.001-07:00

Even her white blood cells were satyagrahi warriors.

one line vii

2011-05-26T05:51:00.000-07:00

Relieve suffering at all times--and when possible, use words.

one line vi

2011-05-24T09:49:00.001-07:00

To the degree you must question authority, question your own first.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

2011-05-20T21:16:00.000-07:00

I have to cook this food for the kids, give them a bath and put them in their beds.

It's a problem to have food?
To have a stove to cook it on?
To have kids?
To have a bathtub, running hot water, soap and towels?
To have beds for kids to sleep in?
To have the ability to cook and give baths?
Fatiguing blessings, maybe; problems, never.

one line v

2011-05-19T14:11:00.000-07:00

When it comes to people, I would rather be beautifully beyond comparing than beautiful beyond compare.

Quiet Please

2011-05-18T10:00:00.001-07:00

Thought process sounds mechanical and as suspect as processed cheese. Intellectual strength may be a matter of what we can comprehend, the number and complexity of concepts we can analyze and evaluate. It may also be a matter of what we can keep out, of how well we can create and sustain a quiet place for fundamental truths, discrete and discreet, to fall and be heard, appear and be seen.

Very Rough Lyric

2011-05-18T09:42:00.001-07:00

Talk to me--
not to your abstractions
not to your principles
not to all the people you are trying
not to be like at this moment
not to everyone I represent
not to everyone you argue with in absentia continually

your face and my face only,
you and I
I to I.

one line iv

2011-05-17T13:36:00.000-07:00

When you choose to take the high road, invite the others to come with you, for those who opposed you on the low road may pull out their mortars.

one line iii

2011-05-16T10:01:00.000-07:00

realization is more than comprehension--it is making real, bringing into being....doing in the light of an enlightened thought

one line ii

2011-05-13T15:33:00.000-07:00

Don't be in a hurry to slow down and you will, at least for a moment.

One Line i

2011-05-10T10:03:00.000-07:00

In the absence of desire, it's nice to have a rational sense of duty to motivate right action.

One Way of Looking at Mothers Day

2011-05-05T18:42:00.000-07:00

A holiday that celebrates what we wish we were or doubt we are can be a tricky time. Maybe we would do well to accept Mothers' Day (and ourselves as the objects of it) as we accept what children make in public or Sunday school--the ready made light verse/hand prints/faint random color marks/emerging visual artist or poet/sweet imperfect art presented with elation and brightness of hope. The dread pedestal of Mother of the Year is mockably out of reach if thought of, and not on most mother's minds, at all ("oh who would ever want to be queen"). But every mother can be the mom (don't you love the plainness of that title, and that it's palindrome holding in it an aspiration to be the same person forward and backward, when viewed from the public or private face?). And every mother can be the mom of the moment being with what she is, children or childless, children absent or present, in the moment and desiring, if not performing, to make herself fully present to the other, especially the others she calls her children.

Art of Integrity

2011-04-29T09:36:00.001-07:00

James Baldwin said "I want to be an honest man and a good writer."

Even as the world benefits from doctors, pilots, mechanics, teachers, counselors and clergy who are competent and full of integrity, the world benefits also from artists who are competent and full of integrity, for what we read, sing, hear and view impact our well-being profoundly.

"love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice"

2010-04-07T17:18:00.000-07:00

(To Be Read While Listening to Greenday's "21 Guns.")

No matter how petty her or his reason seems to us, telling a distraught person to "suck it up" is as damaging as showing pitiful sympathy; it also contains an edge of anger and annoyance that someone is putting ugliness in front of us, or a memory of being in similar distress and receiving similar reprimand. The alternative, comforting the other, is always appropriate in all sufferings, small or great, imagined or real. "Comfort" includes a Late Latin source, confortare meaning "to strengthen greatly"; comfort is empathy with empowerment.

Her Hand

2010-03-26T14:30:00.000-07:00

My mother's greatest expression of kindness was her commitment; her greatest expression of love was her loyalty.

Today two of my daughters received birthday cards in the mail which were addressed by my mother over a year ago (she died February 2009). It made me happy to see her writing, specifically, her penmanship--the fact of her hand.

My mother was a creating writer who wrote to create connections. More than content, the act of communicating--what she called "correspondence"-- was the essence of her writing; perhaps this is why just her printing draws me.

I wish today were only Armistice Day. . .

2009-11-11T06:16:00.000-08:00

But since we've added more wars and more soldiers to our national history, I desire to honor all vets today.

Wilfred Owen, a soldier, poet, and victim of WWI wrote this poem:

Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Wilfred Owen

Pasted from <http://www.poemtree.com/poems/ParableOfTheOldMan.htm>

Soldiers sacrifice themselves both in death and life. Their willingness to do so in a world that operates on a violence paradigm puts a serious moral burden on anyone who commits soldiers to combat.

Borgesian Library Acquisition #7564

2009-10-23T08:22:00.000-07:00

I know one thing for sure: Borges should have won a Nobel Prize.

Speaking of Borges, here are the opening lines from a new book at the library entitled Now Won:

Always talk with the person you're talking with; always be with the person you are being with. Monologues, arguments with the absent, and absent presence deprive us of opportunities to build gratitude and reverence for ourselves and others.

Borgesian Library Acquisition #7373

2009-10-08T13:30:00.000-07:00

Title: Questing for the Authentic in the Self and the Other

Opening Lines: To grow up is to exchange innocence for naïveté. A presence that is mostly absent, delusion is dilution.

The Against Alphabet: F Through Q, Graciously by the Coffee House Cafe, Tuesday Night 22 September 2009

2009-09-25T15:33:00.000-07:00

F by Serenity

F is against fighting, forgery, filing paper medical records, having a frenzied day and feeling frazzled; frostbite, frigid South Dakota weather and freezer burn on a fancy cut of meat.

G by J. Wise

G is against . . .

* greed that we are so overindulgent that we have lost generosity
*guns that cause grief & genocide
*always going from here to there so much that we miss the gold that is found in slowing down to greet & be kind

H by Rick L. Janssen

H is against hitmen and
Damn hades,
That HIV
And 100 degree plus
Hot days

I by Amy W.

I is against
--ignorance
--indifference
--idols
Dis-ingenuous people
--insects that bite people
--inspections
--insurmountable challenges
--intolerance
--introductions via blind dates
--IM'ing

J by Loralie Harper

J is against . . .
Jealousy
Jerkitude attitude
Jive talk and jeers
Justice for some
But not for all

K by C. Meyer

K is against killing and killing killers, against kings and killing kings

L by J.H.

L is against
Lies
Low lifes who do nothing with their lives
Laziness
Lawlessness
Losing love, life, just losing

M by Anonymous

M is against
Murder
Misery
Meniscus
Malicious marauding Martians

N by Justin B.

N is against
Nonthinking responses
Nepotism
narcoleptic Weiner dogs--No Weiner dog should be forced to live without sleep
[See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvMyuZKGKAY ]

O by Jennifer Ya-Ya

O is against overbearing, overzealous, ostentatious opinions expressed by overpaid ubiquitous ogres

P by Blaine Liebnow

P is against pointless wars that we have--
Pollution, prostitution
And the pornographic images
We allow our children to watch.

Q by Adam Wells

Q is against

Quiet . . . Most of the time
Q, because it always needs U

The Against Alphabet: E

2009-09-25T15:32:00.000-07:00

E is against egregious entertainment, escalations, execrations and the idea of an enemy.

The Against Alphabet: D

2009-09-21T07:19:00.000-07:00

D is against dog fighting, damnation, deception, delusion, and dreary wastes we will to remain in longer than necessary.

The Against Alphabet: C

2009-09-18T08:15:00.000-07:00

C is against criticism, cruelty, and criminalization ("If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me.")

Another Borgesian Book

2009-09-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

For 16 months the budget has been lacking at the Borgesian Library. Thanks to a million dollar gift from a nameless donor, new books have been purchased, including one entitled Boredom Not Unto Sanctification. Its opening lines:

All the bad ideas have been taken; clichés (in thought, word, and deed) cause human suffering. Conversely, take it as a proof, similar to the argument from design, that beauty is new and everlasting.

Infinite Mercy

2009-09-11T08:16:00.000-07:00

Today's 9/11/01 memory: the hand of the person taking video of the World Trade Center quickly wiping off the camera lens.

To see that day right, that day we are still fighting in a hard and beautiful mountain land (freedom is hard to endure), what do we need to clear from our perceptions?

The Against Alphabet: B

2009-09-04T07:17:00.000-07:00

B is against bargaining (everything reduced to economic exchange), backbiting and bullying--the weak against the weaker.

B is against branding, bravado, brusqueness and buffoonery in the Old Karamazov way.

The Against Alphabet: A

2009-09-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

A is against angst and anger, aftershocks and aftertastes.
A is against meaningless anguish, artless ambiguity and irresponsive anonymity.

September 1, 1939

2009-09-01T06:25:00.001-07:00

Seventy years after the invasion of Poland, W.H. Auden's true dichotomy remains true:
We must love one another or die.

Fit for a First Lady

2009-04-17T12:34:00.001-07:00

Last night we had grits and waffles for dinner because it's Michelle Obama's favorite breakfast. My oldest son took quick objection (and ate the waffle quickly, too) to the idea of first ladies as a cultural institution. This lead us directly to the scenario of a female president.

What will happen when America really shows its open-mindedness and elects a brilliant, female statesperson as president? Posit that she has a husband, what will he be called? The first gentleman? Will people comment on his great outfit on inauguration day? What good-will causes will he advocate for? What rude political cartoons will arise because of his gender and his position?

This depresses me, but the meal was a hit.

Hot Cross Buns and the Grand Inquisitor

2009-04-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

Thou didst not come down from the Cross when they shouted to Thee, mocking and reviling Thee, "Come down from the cross and we will believe that Thou art He." Thou didst not come down, for again Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou didst crave for free love . . .
--the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov

On Good Friday some children enjoyed these hot cross buns. The youngest child, about 18 months old, did what children often do: she licked and bit off the frosting, and left the rest. It is perhaps fitting that an innocent chose basically to take only the sweetness. The cross, Calvary, along with Gethsemane, represent infinite suffering and a sweetness of infinite love. Perhaps, too, when given choice we can become as this little child and partake as she did.

In Memoriam B.W. Richardson d. 10 February 2009

2009-03-11T09:13:00.000-07:00

Was it a bad wind from Nevada that sowed the cells that grew with the wheat until the angels came to reap her?

Regardless.

She did not fall on the cosmic slapstick banana peel that sends old folks to the hospital and then the mortuary.

She fell like night, a gradual mingling, even with light.

Alyosha Lives

2009-01-26T08:04:00.000-08:00

William Blake said "Imagination is the Divine Vision not of The World nor of Man nor from Man as he is a Natural Man but only as he is a Spiritual Man." Jack London's "To Build a Fire" suggests that imagination is a survival skill for humans. Dostoyevsky imagined an Alyosha. And if we can imagine an Aloysha, either as a writer or a reader, we can also become one, or the best parts of one.

So today I am thinking of Alyosha, and wondering if this line of thought would lead me toward him:

Love, perhaps, is something beyond good and bad. Maybe humans think they have to justify love for a person the way they justify love for an object or an activity; if the object performs well or the activity gives us present pleasure, they are GOOD.

To whom do we have to justify our choice to love another?

We are faced with the face of the other, and sometimes that person, just like ourselves, makes unhappy choices. What if we left the “goodness” or the “badness” of that person’s situation aside and just said “I love that person,” or “I want to love that person?”

Amen! Amen! Amen!

2009-01-20T15:09:00.001-08:00

Today President Obama took office and urged us as Americans "to choose our better history."

Today is a day I will choose to remember as part of our better history.

(And I'd love to see a red man be headman.)

(And eight years from today I would like to see a female president.)

American Victories in the 2008 Election

2008-11-05T17:42:00.000-08:00

President-elect Obama's victory is both authentic and representational. I want to believe that it is important to each American authentically and representationally as well.

In the early 1990s, law professor David Dominguez observed that democracy has come to mean the least we can expect of each other. What can we make of our democracy now? Change we can believe in is change we have to work for. There are limits to what civil government can and ought to aspire to, but why not hope toward those limits?

In Memoriam Val Stroud d. 22 September 2008

2008-10-11T07:16:00.000-07:00

On the afternoon of August 29th, Val and I were waiting for bundles of papers out back the Madison Daily Leader. Val was a taxi driver for the company, and our family has routes. Val was my first source for the news that the Republicans had chosen a woman for vice president candidate. She said she was watching the running mate picks carefully since they say Obama would be assassinated and McCain would die in office.

Val herself died--in the office of a mother--on the 22nd of September. Could it be that the angst and practical aspects of succession and successors were on her mind? Val lead a nation of one; her sole citizen will be her successor.

Acoustical Writing

2008-09-22T07:39:00.000-07:00

The guards turned him over to the emperor, along with his pen, that elegant weapon of an earlier age. "He was armed only with this."

Etchings on brass plates, impress on clay tablets. A finger writes in dust in 1st Century Judea. Chisel in stone, chalk on a slate, palimpest, a bar killed on this tree (knife carve), oxen-skull mile messages, quill dip, fountain drip, blotting paper, sand and blow, bathroom mirror fingers, dusty car fingers ("Wash me"), spray paint protest, pencil on paper scratching for seeds.

Checking "Other"

2008-09-17T11:06:00.001-07:00

No one has a corner on privilege--or marginalization for that matter. Perhaps only the delusional and ruthless (albeit temporarily) or the Alyoshas and Gandhis can feel secure in the world.

Free me from demographics. If I check the "white" box have I stereotyped myself, become prey to cliché?

Can it be that uniqueness is everyone's gift, and unity is everyone's potential?

opening line from another Borgesian book

2008-09-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

Cliches Fail Her Again

Tears didn't roll down her cheeks. It wasn't that she didn't cry, but that her tears were rectangular and heavy, like bricks. They couldn't roll.

Spare the Narration

2008-08-04T09:37:00.000-07:00

Among the most effective things--things of the mechanical and living world--are gifts given without sound. Perhaps silence is the music of the spheres--Earth is moving very fast and very quietly around the sun and holds quiet even though we fill it with violence. When it has spoken, we know it suffers--but it still loves; we don't feel the journey we take every 365 days, because we travel with it; Earth carries us on its back.

The grains that grow from the earth and become bread never begrudge that we aren't working from germination to loaf's end to serve so singly as they do. Rare if never the narration from Earth and what lives around us: "Look at me, look what I've just done and what I've got to do, and why don't you help me out?"

Gratitude is overwhelming in a world that is at once fecund, sacrificing, and silent.

In Memoriam Jack Warren Meyer, Sr. d. 20 July 2008

2008-07-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

When we children received gifts and services with silence, mothers said:
"What do you say?"
With a prompt, we were quick to say "thank you."
Or we hurt somebody. "Say you're sorry." So we said "I'm sorry," but it was harder than "thank you." It's more common to hear "you're not really sorry" than "you're not really grateful."

So we children grow up and someone dies and we say "I'm sorry."

Trying to fill the silence of death is a necessary impossibility with anything less than the Word. Meanwhile, we say something. Take and read:

I don't too much believe Uncle Walt:

Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

I'm more toward Auden:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen,

Would we do better , since we're awkwardly silent and kid clueless (innocently uncomprehending) to quote our mothers, to say "thank you?"

Borges, the librarians are tired--but they processed a new book for you

2008-07-10T19:45:00.001-07:00

Googling Zaabalawi

More Books, Borges (opening lines)

2008-07-07T09:22:00.000-07:00

Mouth Music: The Democracy of Poetry

Requiring no instruments and no gifted voice, poetry is mouth music. If you can willingly repeat, you can perform a poem.

Discussion Angst

The hardest conversations one will ever have (or avoid) are with oneself.

Visions for the Brothers Karamazov

2008-06-21T20:05:00.000-07:00

It is troubling that Smerdyakov is cast as being beyond conflict; does this grant him some sort of redemption by being , oxymoron intended, a depraved innocent?

The other Brothers Karamazov all get a vision. Alyosha sees the wedding at Cana. Mitya sees the babe of the steppe. Ivan's vision. . . Well, does he get a vision? How appropriate that his vision is so disappointing both to himself and to me as a reader. Whether it's all himself talking to himself or Satan talking to him, or as suggested, some other demon pretending to be Satan and thereby mocking Ivan, or Satan pretending to be Ivan's thoughts . . . The vision is absurd, wearying, and tedious. But there is in the vision at least one comprehensible assessment and one comprehensible hope.

The assessment: when the "gentleman" says "You are for ever angry, all you care about is intelligence . . ."

The hope: When Ivan defends: "I forbid you to speak of 'The Grand Inquisitor.'" He says this "crimson with shame." Why? Perhaps the "poem," as he calls it, is his vision, as far as he is able to receive one (only through the medium of his own tenacious, hermetic intellect)? The poem itself is perhaps his kiss from a silenced God.

Pinapple Compote

2008-06-21T20:03:00.000-07:00

In Brothers Karamazov, Lise confesses to Alyosha how she fantasizes about eating "pineapple compote" while watching another human being suffer. While she thinks this reveals her depravity (she's rather charmed by this), it may be her first step (maybe the 15th) toward compassion; an awareness of the disjunction between gratifying the flesh while flesh is suffering (e.g. popcorn at a horror movie) reveals sensitivity that can prompt to compassion.

Che, Borges . . . ficciones

2008-05-29T07:31:00.000-07:00

Fiction is the base and non-fiction is the derivative, the variation. What is imagined or created precedes that which "is," factually, in found reality. Literary art, then, is not an add on to the human experience but in some degrees a creating of it.

The Other

2008-04-28T14:27:00.000-07:00

Banish the cliché They didn't have much, but they had each other.

Love is not compensation but culmination, the reason for being.

Che, Borges . . . otro libro para (tal vez por) Ud.

2008-04-15T15:16:00.000-07:00

Respice Finem: the virtue of thinking inside the box

Opening line from The Eschatology of Education (another book in the MBL)

2008-04-04T14:10:00.000-07:00

She would have been a good woman if she had been a substitute teacher every day of her life.

from the MBL BF 608-635 stacks

2008-04-04T14:08:00.000-07:00

In Your Tamest Dreams: Self-Control Fantasies

"Limited Time" Is Redundant

2008-04-01T15:30:00.000-07:00

The hour glass of each day is filled
not with sand, but manna.

New Title in the MBL (Madison Borgesian Library)

2008-03-31T20:29:00.000-07:00

Awareness Appreciation Day

Two Aquisitions at the Madison Borgesian Library

2008-03-26T15:09:00.000-07:00

The Madison Borgesian Library acquired two new books today:

Teaching, the Moral Equivalent of War

American Mystery Plays: The Textuality and Spiritual Instruction of Spectator Sports

Preface to the third volume in the Madison Borgesian Library

2008-03-09T19:59:00.000-07:00

New to the collection this week is Defiantly Confused: I have no clue about clichés. Here is the preface:

It's the little things . . .

I would start with a string of curse words, 'cuz they're the most blatant clichés out there.

An important life lesson is that there are just so many clichés out there in today's society that you just end up taking them for granted because they're always there for you. If clichés were food, they would defiantly be a taste sensation that you could just wash down with a glass of ice-cold milk. You never know when life is going to throw a cliché at you, and you just won't appreciate them until their gone, but then maybe you'll be able to think outside the box.

WNBA

2008-03-06T17:23:00.001-08:00

When I hear of women's writing I think of girl's basketball; the "real" writing and basketball require no modifiers.

Second Volume in the Madison Boregsian Library

2008-03-06T17:21:00.000-08:00

Indifference as Control: Tyrannical Dismissal of the Other

Borgesian Library Opens in Madison, South Dakota

2008-02-08T10:55:00.000-08:00

The first book:
Teaching without Mystery, Miracle, or Authority: A Poetics of Pedagogy

no criminal standing before me

2008-02-05T01:35:00.000-08:00

When I was young, I Ioved Fisher-Price play sets. I really liked the town, with its gas station, post office, dentist office and so on. Oddly this utopia of smiling armless people had a jail. When my sister and I felt bad about putting the figures in jail, we used wooden blocks--I believe we would have chosen stubby green rectangle and purple cylindrical wooden ones--for our criminals. At one level that was nice, but at another, troubling, because we chose to still have criminality in our town, and chose to take our criminals from the ranks of the foreign and absolutely non-personal (non-humanlike). Why insist that criminality exist, as if it were an entertaining or community necessity? I once heard an essay on public radio about how crime (or was it poverty? No matter--I think the same sorry logic was discussed) is economically beneficial and therefore encouraged to the degree that people make a legitimate living dealing with criminal elements--or something like that--which to me seemed a jarring idea . . . Until I remember the toy town I played with.

If only it had come with a Fisher Price monastery with a Zossima figure, I could have worked things out.

Build a Better Mouse

2008-01-25T20:22:00.000-08:00

When I lived on a farm in Lamar County, keeping mice out of our single-wide was a matter for continuous quality improvement.

Ultrasonic plug-ins seemed effective and humane, and poison packets, pellet boxes and bar poisons worked, too.

Snap traps were luckless, and glue traps were marginal (I did some catch and release, but later only caught, and more than I liked, a mouse would struggle away with the trap in the vent system never to be found but to be smelled until the decaying was done).

I really should have found a way to build a better mouse--one that would not need to be trapped because it stayed where it was best for all interested parties. I should have found a way to build a better mouse catcher--one that would know how to be all things to all creatures.

Zossima's maxim works, then, in many situations:

If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me.

And perhaps it is the grace of God that helps me see that whoever goes, there go I.

Damned Fingerprints

2008-01-23T18:58:00.001-08:00

Some days ago a new job found me getting fingerprinted as part of a background check. The officer was skeptical if my prints would work--winter dryness and rigorous hand washing left my finger pads cracked, their prints resembling a black and white satellite image of roads dissecting a landscape. Was Lady MacBeth trying to wash away chronic identity as well as acute guilt?

to a degree

2008-01-23T18:56:00.000-08:00

How on a sunny day in Northern Hemisphere January it can be -3 F seems almost wrong. But there's the consequence and the blessing, metaphorically speaking. To tip away from the center of energy and order is a cold burning--but the light is stretched out still.

Our Delight

2008-01-23T18:55:00.000-08:00

Developmentally cued, the baby leans into a turn, back to front, a few days after her three-month birthday. That this motion should be instinctual resonates with the hymn:

To turn, turn, will be our delight
'til by turning, turning we come 'round right.

Bien Hecho

2008-01-23T18:53:00.001-08:00

When my two-year-old daughter did a good job and received the commendation bien hecho for the first time, she repeated what she heard: be an angel, followed by "Be an angel, Mom; be an angel, Dad."

Anno Domini

2008-01-01T19:34:00.000-08:00

Last night I was preparing to drive home from a family get-together. It was about nine degrees F and very fine metallic snow was falling, or refalling, I'm not certain. I was thinking of Mitya's dream of the cold people in despair: Why don't they hug each other and kiss? Why don't they sing songs of joy? And there was the possible key to why people on the North American analogue of the steppe stay up late on New Year's Eve: to celebrate their sociality, to stand against the cold and dark and not take cover and dream of hibernation when to be awake and festive is counterintuitive. It isn't even that the wakeful mock the night--there is no emnity, only the opposition of life, the contradiction that creates and keeps.

Mitya's Dream: More from The Brothers Karamazov

2007-12-10T07:47:00.000-08:00

After his interrogation relative to the murder of his father, Mitya has a dream; it is a poem, like and unlike Ivan's poem of the Grand Inquisitor. It bears repeating in full:

He was driving somewhere in the steppes, where he had been stationed long ago, and a peasant was driving him in a cart with a pair of horses, through snow and sleet. He was cold, it was early in November, and the snow was falling in big wet flakes, melting as soon as it touched the earth. And the peasant drove him smartly, he had a fair, long beard. He was not an old man, somewhere about fifty, and he had on a grey peasant's smock. Not far off was a village, he could see the black huts, and half the huts were burnt down, there were only the charred beams sticking up. And as they drove in, there were peasant women drawn up along the road, a lot of women, a whole row, all thin and wan, with their faces a sort of brownish colour, especially one at the edge, a tall, bony woman, who looked forty, but might have been only twenty, with a long thin face. And in her arms was a little baby crying. And her breasts seemed so dried up that there was not a drop of milk in them. And the child cried and cried, and held out its little bare arms, with its little fists blue from cold.
"Why are they crying? Why are they crying?" Mitya asked, as they dashed gaily by.
"It's the babe," answered the driver, "the babe weeping."
And Mitya was struck by his saying, in his peasant way, "the babe," and he liked the peasant's calling it a "babe." There seemed more pity in it.
"But why is it weeping?" Mitya persisted stupidly, "why are its little arms bare? Why don't they wrap it up?"
"The babe's cold, its little clothes are frozen and don't warm it."
"But why is it? Why?" foolish Mitya still persisted.
"Why, they're poor people, burnt out. They've no bread. They're begging because they've been burnt out."
"No, no," Mitya, as it were, still did not understand. "Tell me why it is those poor mothers stand there? Why are people poor? Why is the babe poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don't they hug each other and kiss? Why don't they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black misery? Why don't they feed the babe?"
And he felt that, though his questions were unreasonable and senseless, yet he wanted to ask just that, and he had to ask it just in that way. And he felt that a passion of pity, such as he had never known before, was rising in his heart, that he wanted to cry, that he wanted to do something for them all, so that the babe should weep no more, so that the dark-faced, dried-up mother should not weep, that no one should shed tears again from that moment, and he wanted to do it at once, at once, regardless of all obstacles, with all the recklessness of the Karamazovs.

Pasted from <http://www.classicreader.com/read.php/bookid.276/sec.61/>

So significant it is that it is a crying baby. A baby's cry is raw; it is not eloquent; is not polite or contrived; it is a cry without guilt, without manipulation. It wrenches multitasking ; no one can respond with the rudely unaccountable cliché "I'll give you something to cry about." A baby's cry calls to accountability.

That Mitya should dream so says something of his core purity, either that his mind could create the dream--if it were an ordering of things-- or that his soul could receive it, if it were an epiphany, a gift. So far in the novel Mitya has been an object for compassionate pity; here, he becomes the offering.

"The Everlasting Yea"

2007-12-04T09:53:00.000-08:00

Know your limits and limit your no's.

My Hic Jacet

2007-12-04T09:51:00.000-08:00

where fierce cliches no longer tear the heart

Scooby Doo and Flannery O'Connor

2007-11-26T09:34:00.001-08:00

Anagogic cartoons? Perhaps:

Enter the soul-selling, sinister grotesques looking for gain. They hide their true identities and cause sanitized suffering.

Enter the silly, fools-for-goodness grotesques in extreme situations looking for clues. They meddle and unmask.

It looks like we have another mystery on our hands.

Response Space

2007-11-26T09:32:00.000-08:00

One of the comforts of online interaction is the very evident asynchronicity and the quietness in which one communicates with the other: a pip-pip-pip of a keyboard and the inoffensive doorbell when a message comes in; the liberty to respond as quickly or slowly (or not-at-ally) as one wishes; the fact that interaction is edited. This all makes politeness more possible.

Even though the face to face is absolutely present, it still contains, (lest we forget) the response space. Stephen Covey discusses this in his Seven Habits book/paradigm: "Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose" (70).

So it would be easier, to the degree that online experiences allow more response space, if the personal experience could be more like an online experience. How would that happen, and how would it feel?

Ultimately, everything civil has much time involved--even the thing that happens in a moment and in the moment goes much better if it has been prepared for eternities before.

This has touched thy lips

2007-11-14T08:37:00.001-08:00

The peanut butter cookie crumbles were oven-hot. As all too usual, my impulse was to put them to my mouth, which I did. If burning one's finger's is unpleasant, burning one's tongue is even more so, both for the pain and the reduction of pleasure as tasting is lost--ironic, then, that if something is too hot to handle, I quickly put it to my lips, my tongue.

Maybe that is the writer's impulse--the hot things, the hard things--they feel bad peripherally, so we put them to our lips, our tongues. Isn't the mouth even more sensitive than the calloused, over-washed hand, isn't the risk greater? I realize writers use instruments--pens, pencils, keyboards--hand items--to do their craft, but writing begins with the heart-mind-tongue. [And I realize that there is a speech/writing relationship/difference that deserves discussion in itself--will you accept for now that words are words and allow the play between oral and written--will you accept the blur term, verbal?]

It brings me to Isaiah chapter six. The prophet receives his calling in the divine presence and realizes he is mortal:

Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.

Curious that what unsettles Isaiah is the imperfection of speech, of language--symbolized by the lips. This realization invites divine intervention:

Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.

I think of the unclean--the cliches we have spoken and written and continue to speak and write (and worse, think), especially the coarse cliches and languages of totality, violence, and demand. Maybe it is the acceptance and saying of the hard, the painful, the sacrificing, the purifying things that makes us write and can make us writers, that allows us to say, as Isaiah:

Here am I; send me.

Intestinal Inspiration

2007-11-12T09:04:00.000-08:00

The ironists will say "the baby is smiling because she has gas."

But if one can smile--and bring joy to others--while having gas, so much the better.

Moshe's Veil

2007-10-29T08:40:00.000-07:00

Two things the natural man cannot endure: the divine presence and the divine absence.

Cupcake Tins of Infinite Space

2007-10-05T09:32:00.000-07:00

I do not feel stifled in cupcake making because I use cupcake tins. I accept the form and within it have many choices and variable outcomes. Analogously, I don't feel bad giving students form-based instructions for their writings.

Form does not create poor writing; it's what we bring or don't bring to the form that does. Form is not formulaic.

Staight Edge Hospitality Suite

e-ew!

one line xxix

two lines i

Let us not speak of losing control of people, but of losing our intervening love for them. Helping others do right is not a matter of compulsion and extortion, but of compassion and confidence; at once staying close and letting go.

one line xxiv

one line xxiii

one line xxii

one line xxi

and try living in the present, really the present, speaking and thinking only of and to the persons directly in front of you

one line xx

one line ixx

a few lines i

one line xviii

unpolished unpolished post i

one line xvii

enough suffering

Three Lines III

three lines ii

one line xvi

three lines i

one line xv

one line xiv

one line xiii

imagined dialogue ii

imagined dialogue i

one line xii

one line xi

one line x

Didactic Poem #8

See the splendorand the suffering--look for the good that isand the good you must do.

two lines i

one line ix

one line viii

one line vii

one line vi

What's Wrong With This Picture?

one line v

Quiet Please

Very Rough Lyric

one line iv

one line iii

one line ii

Don't be in a hurry to slow down and you will, at least for a moment.

One Line i

One Way of Looking at Mothers Day

Art of Integrity

"love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice"

Her Hand

I wish today were only Armistice Day. . .

Borgesian Library Acquisition #7564

Borgesian Library Acquisition #7373

The Against Alphabet: F Through Q, Graciously by the Coffee House Cafe, Tuesday Night 22 September 2009

The Against Alphabet: E

The Against Alphabet: D

The Against Alphabet: C

Another Borgesian Book

Infinite Mercy

The Against Alphabet: B

The Against Alphabet: A

September 1, 1939

Fit for a First Lady

Hot Cross Buns and the Grand Inquisitor

In Memoriam B.W. Richardson d. 10 February 2009

Alyosha Lives

Amen! Amen! Amen!

American Victories in the 2008 Election

In Memoriam Val Stroud d. 22 September 2008

Acoustical Writing

Checking "Other"

opening line from another Borgesian book

Spare the Narration

In Memoriam Jack Warren Meyer, Sr. d. 20 July 2008

Borges, the librarians are tired--but they processed a new book for you

More Books, Borges (opening lines)

Visions for the Brothers Karamazov

Pinapple Compote

Che, Borges . . . ficciones

The Other

Che, Borges . . . otro libro para (tal vez por) Ud.

See the splendor
and the suffering--
look for the good that is
and the good you must do.