tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86495645136541213332024-02-07T00:34:13.538-05:00The Next Circle"Around every circle another can be drawn."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Circles."Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.comBlogger191125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-3826001209290356522018-12-01T21:13:00.000-05:002018-12-01T21:13:47.579-05:00Memorial Service for Hollis HustonHollis Huston, a Unitarian chaplain, teacher, performer, and writer, had been living with prostate cancer for more months and years than we
want to count. As Hollis said, "I am up against a clever and
evolutionarily advanced adversary." <br /><br />Hollis passed away on the morning of August 2nd, 2018. He was at home, comfortable and at peace, surrounded by his family.<br />
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A memorial service was held on September 30th, 2018, at The Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City. You can listen to the recording of the service here:<br />
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http://hollishuston.podbean.com/ <br />
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As noted earlier, you can learn more about Hollis, at CaringBridge.org: <br />
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https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/hollis-at-the-next-circle<br />
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You can read the thoughts that others have shared, and please feel free to share your own.Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-49506693773690763942018-07-25T10:19:00.000-04:002018-07-25T13:52:12.616-04:00Hollis is at the Next CircleAs some of you may know, Hollis Huston has been living with cancer for a few years. He has found that despite all attempts to manage it, it has found a way to stay one step ahead. As Hollis said, "I am up against a clever and evolutionarily advanced adversary."<br />
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It is now time to turn to hospice care. His family has set up an online space to keep family and friends, colleagues, students, and readers of this blog updated in one place:<br />
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<a href="https://www.caringbridge.org/public/hollis-at-the-next-circle">https://www.caringbridge.org/public/hollis-at-the-next-circle</a><br />
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We also want to use that site to collect your recollections and thoughts of Hollis. He and his family would love to hear from you.<br />
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Thank you for visiting, and thinking about Hollis.<br />
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--Hollis' FamilyHollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-89778683039037252932017-12-30T15:56:00.000-05:002018-01-02T10:54:07.114-05:00white whale<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">. . . a voice from the sky, Lady, . . .</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">. . . Telling us of God being born</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the world of men.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Clive Sansom, "The Shepherd's Carol"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> . . . <span style="text-indent: -1em;">If someone said on Christmas Eve,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“Come; see the oxen kneel, . . ."</span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: -1em;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> . . . I should go with him in the gloom,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Hoping it might be so.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Thomas Hardy, "The Oxen"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I no longer have a problem of belief. I believe. In my way. My way may not satisfy everyone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I believe these tropes in the way I believe <i>King Lear</i>, <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, "All the Things You Are," <i>War and Peace</i>, "Paul Revere's Ride," <span style="text-indent: -1em;">Beethoven's Ninth, "An die Freude," </span><i style="text-indent: -1em;">Guernica</i><span style="text-indent: -1em;">,</span><span style="text-indent: -1em;"> </span><i style="text-indent: -1em;">Moby Dick</i><span style="text-indent: -1em;">,</span><span style="text-indent: -1em;"> </span><i style="text-indent: -1em;">Fences</i><span style="text-indent: -1em;">, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,"</span><span style="text-indent: -1em;"> </span><i style="text-indent: -1em;">Beloved</i><span style="text-indent: -1em;">, and . . . so on; which is to say I believe them to the bottom of my being. You cannot tell me these tropes are false, for I have gone on road trips with Lear riding shotgun, have traversed meat-markets by the guidance of Elizabeth, have sailed with hunters of White Whales, have applauded the courage of those who lead their beloveds out of slavery but then assault them. . . . All this in a modest and obscure life. You wouldn't know it to look at me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">That's what the tropes are for, to raise grandeur from the ordinary. Thank the lord I am ordinary, until something comes out that was not in me. In the face of a universe whose enormity only mathematicians can symbolize and none of us can comprehend, there rises through art and faith an opening to act as if my life mattered, and yours. We can speak of inspiration, of synergy, of peak experience, but some poets call it Incarnation, when word is made flesh.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">So likewise, don't tell me the tropes of Incarnation are false. I know otherwise. In my time peace has been made where there was no hope of peace. <span style="text-indent: -24px;">I have shared truth when there was nothing true about me. </span><span style="text-indent: -1em;">I have seen lights that can only shine in a darkness that I have walked, knowing that if the darkness had been less the light would not have shined. </span><span style="text-indent: -1em;">And I regularly enjoy a blessing that I did not earn.</span></span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: -1em;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I work in the face of mortality, pain and grief, and I bring no antidote. I cannot fix these things. And it's worse than that. My complexion is that of the doctors who infected black men with syphilis in Tuskegee. My gender is that of people who have demeaned, abused and assaulted women. </span></span><span style="text-indent: -1em;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A walking cipher of reasons for human suffering, born by cosmic lottery ("thrown"* as Heidegger said) into white and male advantage, I learn how corrupted is my judgment, how twisted are my intentions; and my faith group urges me to apply to myself words </span></span><span style="text-indent: -1em;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">once reserved for the Klan, or for predators now exploding and cast into darkness.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="text-indent: -1em;">Problem is, I have work to do. There is the work of living -- acts of value, relationships of love and justice, protection of the innocent who suffer, and support for virtues that preserve the world from savagery. I cannot do it with a hood on. I must come to you, sibling of color or sister, hoping there is something decent in me. </span>I must assume a competence of compassion, pretending that<span style="text-indent: -1em;"> with attention I can feel something like your feeling, comprehend your need, respect your dignity.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="text-indent: -1em;">There is also the formal work for which I am paid a salary -- my ministry. </span><span style="text-indent: -1em;">I am ordinary, and there is nothing immaculate about me. I am born of and imbedded in structures of cruelty and injustice. I do not with any strictness deserve to do the work many clients would call God's work. My physical form connotes the pain and oppression of many. And yet I am called, and in the time when I respond to that call my faults like Isaiah's** will be swept inconveniently off the table, putting an end to procrastination. I need to do the work, and they need for me to do it, and we play together an old vaudeville, a trope that we might as well call forgiveness. What a mess.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="text-indent: -1em;">It's the mess of being alive as a human being, not on a seminar table but progressing in bad shoes over ragged terrain as a pilgrim. </span><span style="text-indent: -1em;">Though not sufficient, my good intention is necessary. Even if I don't deserve to be good, I must act out my goodness. In showbiz they say fake it till you make it. They say it elsewhere too. And do it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="text-indent: -1em;">The poems say that in this season we get a gift from the uncanny. This year people came back to me from more than a life ago, who have done well and present me with their stories, in which I have a cameo. Their gifts were unexpected, but </span><span style="text-indent: -1em;">I also receive on a daily schedule.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="text-indent: -1em;"> I report Good News in a sacred season, meaning not an otherworldly season, but a this-worldly season where, as certain poets say, God has come to us. </span></span><span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;">I believe this as I believe, well, you know . . . I swear it on the mangled carcass of the White Whale.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: -1em;">*"geworfen"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">**"Your guilt shall depart/And your sin be purged away" (<i>Is 6:7</i> [Tanakh])</span></div>
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Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-75802132764915986732017-12-05T18:46:00.001-05:002017-12-11T10:42:15.310-05:00superlative obscurity<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">. . . And I thought, I've got nothing . . . which meant, I had nothing to lose.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Bruce Springsteen*</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">You can mould clay into a vessel;</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><div style="text-align: center;">
yet, it is its emptiness that makes it useful.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- <i>Tao Te Ching</i>, 11 </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I was brought up to get it <i>right</i>, no matter what the cost. If the assignment, the action, the long division problem, the situation, whatever, wasn't <i>right</i> -- well, then it was my fault: I had obviously not worked hard enough. I must go back to work right <i>now</i>, and must not stop until all was correct; and whoever stood in my way because they didn't understand, or thought I was wrong or untimely or misdirected, had to be <i>set right</i>. By me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Great accomplishments were expected, to be attained only through unremitting effort. I was not to set the matter aside, or read a book, or watch tv, or work on a more gratifying project, or go to bed in hope of morning insight. That's what lazy people do, said the voice, and if you act like them you'll waste your talents. Anything you don't get <i>right</i> is worthless. And here would follow a list of people known to me who had come to nothing because they had been lazy and wasted their talents.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">If you screw up enough things you might make something work in the end, and I am a man of superlative obscurity in a fourth career, disappointing the voice of endless demand, never attaining more than a middling income and often struggling for that. I've been hired and fired, but never had the power to hire or fire anyone. In these times perhaps that is a blessing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">To be a first-born son, informed at the age of eight that I had an intellect, is as much curse as blessing. My responsibility to the gift, always defined by someone else, often overwhelmed me. Perhaps in my eighth decade, right now, on this page, for your eyes only, I apply it to something of my own.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Perfectionists have their uses. They get a lot of things right. That's how they're driven. And they're alone on their faultless shore.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But some things can never be right, not the way a page of long division is supposed to be right.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And the cost of rightness, that rightness of a sum, saps not only the visceral power but the mental ones as well. Not even mathematics is tidy right. The structure of the universe depends on an irrational number. No matter how many digits you write, you can never get <i>pi</i> just right.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Chanticleer sang again the other night at the Church of Ignatius Loyola (so yes, now Christmas can come). They were singing the lullaby <i>Suo Gan</i>, and my favorite singer had a solo, and I turned to my daughter saying "That's my boy!", but before I turned back the song was done, and their so soft cadence had pounced on me, beyond right, uncanny and there was water in my eyes. I wasn't ready. That's the point.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The <i>right</i> of music, and the <i>right</i> of a poem, and the <i>right</i> of love, these are not to be carried and remaindered. You know when it's there, but there's no map to take you all the way. Every musician knows how to get to Carnegie Hall (practice practice practice), but no one tells you when or where to leap off the building, though you must fly part of that way or they won't let you in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The things I've done best I had no idea how to do, and I was sore afraid, wishing I knew how to get it right. The only thing I had was a need to jump off the building. These few works, of theatre or teaching or ministry or <i>caritas</i>, were uncharted. Step by step and breath by breath, feeling wind on my face and shift of ground beneath my feet, I would pray for a provisional truth to reveal itself for one more day. I didn't know. I wasn't full of knowledge. I was empty. I had nothing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The risks are real. Human beings can get it wrong, Terribly wrong, pitiably wrong, or damnably wrong. You can harm yourself and you can harm others. That's the basis of the fear, the <i>holy terror</i> that accompanies every truly important act. But the surest road to hell is the highway of utter safety.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And that's the beauty of this last career of mine, its anti-perfectionism. I've been forced off the island of perfection. I'm really not supposed to know, as I pass over a threshold of pain and fear, what the good news is. I'm supposed to discover it there, in that room, and name it and bless it. My usefulness is to be empty.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">*The <i>New Yorker</i> Radio Hour, November 25, 2017.</span><br />
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Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-8635685721631025862017-11-14T14:31:00.000-05:002017-11-24T13:18:24.004-05:00windy will<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Perhaps a squirrel will remain -</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">My sentiments to share -</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind -</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Thy windy will to bear!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Emily Dickinson, "Besides the Autumn Poets Sing"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">My northeast New Jerusalem is becoming tropical, and we've waited far too long this year for the change. A week ago I was sweating in short sleeves, but now at last comes the weather that brings me life. No snow yet, but I've had to climb into my long coat, rediscover its obscure fastenings, find my gloves.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">My friend thinks I am morbid. Snap out of it! he says.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But I'm not sad. Winds are in my face, and that makes me strong. The fertile half of the year is before me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Son of a preacher and spouse of another, an academic for the larger part of my adulthood, I was formed not on the calendar year but on church and school year. In those measures Autumn is the time of when things begin, the big bang of inspiration. The cold wind, and the now rare but longed for blast of snow in my face, wake me to productivity and efficiency. The loss of light does not oppress but thrills me. My seasonal affective disorder comes not now but sometimes in the spring with too much light, and with the end of things I had begun.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">So this is my November song, drawing perhaps, as good songs do, tears out of joy, or joy out of tears. Isn't that the darnedest thing? that our happy songs can make us cry, and our saddest songs can make us happy? Singing is our rescue from mortality, a rescue of self but also of the moment. The song is the thing that we make of it, the thing that stands outside, might live longer than the moment on which it was drawn. I lash these words together in order not to be morbid.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">So I am one of those weird brothers who thrives in winter, traveling in fantasy not to sun-drenched beaches but to sea-thrashed cloudy islands where, above a cliff in bulky sweater and a hut of stone, I sip my smoky single-malt and battle rapturously with words, words words of others and my own in descant. Some may ask why I am so sour, but I am not sour -- this is the location of my peaty sweetness.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It's not the first time I have been misread. I see now for instance, with almost two decades of remove, that the years I worked in theatre were years of misplacement. I was with the wrong people, and they frequently misread my silences as discontent. Sometimes they were right, but often not.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Now, as my friend points out, I have a lot on my plate; or rather, something on my plate that was not there earlier; or rather, someone who looks over my shoulder in the mirror. For two years -- this is how I like to say it -- I have known the name of my angel, and in the last year I've spoken about it to others, and I've also spoken about how things look in the presence of the visitor. One personality scale designates me an Intuitive Introvert, intense on both dimensions. I process inwardly, and I don't know what to say until I'm done; but when I'm done I speak. And these last two years are the best, so far, of my life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">So I may seem to <i>brood</i>, and perhaps this behavior is what the word means, though I am surprised to live under it. High on my windy cliff I'm having a good time getting ready, Mr. DeMille, for my aria. And different observers may have different impressions of the figure I cut as I wait. So you don't have to worry. Well, worry a little, but not too much, and enjoy the whiskey.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There is for instance Altagracia, whom we are in danger of misreading. She overwhelmed me, when I went to see her, with her lamentation. She's lost a toe already, and large parts of her feet may have to be removed in order to "save" her, a recommendation that she loudly refuses, as she charges about her apartment and the neighborhood. She'd rather die, she says, refusing to live "that way," on such humiliating terms, and she indicts God: "Why should I suffer so? what did I ever do?" She tells us the stories of five attempts to end her life, and the stories with retelling become less tragic, more darkly comical, and she laughs with me. I've done this work a while, but her lamentation at first overwhelmed me; I provided audience, but couldn't see the strategy, until I took her "case" to a group of my peers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">They said, don't get trapped in the clinical psychology, the "issues" of denial, shame and control. Listen to the song of her spirit. She is still alive, and on her terms. She challenges us, and refuses to be dead. Learn from her courage and from the strength of her will, and from her powerful projection of lament. She will die some day, but has not yet been reduced. There is trouble ahead, but also beauty here.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Altagracia and I are very different people, and her situation is different. She has much less time before her than I. But in my present mode I am a fellow traveler with all my clients. They narrate a thousand nights: there is always another tale to tell the angel, and I can mistake the tone and the substance as well as anyone.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Don't worry too much, and enjoy the whiskey.</span><br />
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<br />Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-85867376639947400112017-10-31T22:48:00.000-04:002017-11-01T10:35:48.670-04:00self discovery<br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Ayn Rand</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">No man is an island.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- John Donne</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">You have to know yourself, and that's hard, and it takes time. A lifetime, and still not done. So it is likened to a journey that will take what you have, and must then be left to others.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the present critical and theoretical climate, it's hard to imagine a voyage of discovery as virtuous. So let's not call it virtuous, let's call it necessary. Because when we're born we don't know who we are. In fact, we don't even know <i>that</i> we are. I learn that the sound filling the room and bringing comfort is my own act: I am the one who cries. I have to be taught that the stinky mass appearing several times a day between my legs is something made by me, and I must control and learn to dispose of it myself. I am told that the odd creature pointing at me in the mirror has a name, and that the name of it is my name.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Then it gets really complicated. I learn that I like ice cream and hate spinach, because they feel good or awful in the mouth, because I crave them or cringe at their approach, because I have fantasies of one and nightmares of the other. I learn that throwing and catching a ball feels good to me, or not. I learn that making a series of tones out of my whining seems a thing essentially worthy, or not. I learn that books comfort me, or not.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I come to know, often painfully, the wandering of my eros: what signals of gender, culture, passion and disgust, make my body feel like it belongs with another body. Or not. I learn, if I am fortunate and acquire the skills of such learning, what kind of person could be my friend. And what kinds could not. It might begin to dawn on me what the work of my life is.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Through intuition but also through blunder and error, you learn which activities are yours to do, making the existential pain go away not just for a moment but from hours to days, days to weeks, weeks to years to the rest of life. And you learn which activities should be done by someone else. And which should be done by no one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">"There's no great trick," says a character in <i>Citizen Kane</i>, "to making a lot of money, if all you want to do is make a lot of money." Making a lot of money was clearly not my life's work. But that's just one example, and not one that I have broken my heart over. More painful as a child to learn that athletic competence is not my life's work. Very painful as a youth to learn that concert pianism is not my life's work. Long and painful to learn after youth that my burdensome intellect does not belong in the schools.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">So here I run in my groove, not always comfortable, not always right, and yet the groove seems to fit. People look at me, hear me, and say I have the look and the voice of a chaplain. There was a time when I would have taken offense at this. Nowadays I am glad to let go of imposture, the strain of portraying what I am not. Though even this rut might finally prove false, I have seen many things I am not, and I'm not going back.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But this is just my trek, and yours is for you to tell. So far I have described the interior voyage, the delving into unknown parts of the heart to discover what we must become. Discovery means to remove the cover. Revelation is to re-veal, taking down the veil of the temple. You find only what was always there.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And now you must return. This is the exterior voyage, the resumption of life that awaits when you return from the deep to the surface, with precious cargo. If you can't disembark with it, your Precious will rot in your hold. It must be for someone, or you'll never have enough of it. You'll only have enough if you give it away.</span></div>
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Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-27094706289991478172017-10-29T23:37:00.000-04:002017-12-12T15:58:42.236-05:00thirteen years<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ1weBIj487axr3V5_UJfmnaY0nW_Tfw1v0yDKNMQsVhM_5IyyFjD0JCI3uOiD5OYdr-i61xuFlJw9yb-3ACHym9eyJ1erVHkWfg_DvU3VeVwvHRqngKwO62rF2bd5Ou-yfuks0okclIQ/s1600/red+leaves.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="960" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ1weBIj487axr3V5_UJfmnaY0nW_Tfw1v0yDKNMQsVhM_5IyyFjD0JCI3uOiD5OYdr-i61xuFlJw9yb-3ACHym9eyJ1erVHkWfg_DvU3VeVwvHRqngKwO62rF2bd5Ou-yfuks0okclIQ/s200/red+leaves.JPG" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Fall is when the only things you know</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">because I've named them</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">begin to end.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Maggie Smith, "First Fall"*</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Death, of course, is not a failure.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Atul Gawande, <i>Being Mortal</i>**</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Thirteen years ago this month I made my first visits in the role of a chaplain.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">My teacher, boss, trainer gave me eight patients in home care. Because I didn't know better, I visited all eight of them every week. After a few weeks of holy terror my ministry became a routine, predictable service from month to month. I went to their homes, heard their stories, checked in with the daughter or son or spouse or whoever was watching the journey. Each client took their place in the picaresque course of my life, each forming a chapter, a diversion, postponement and prolongation of my own strand of mortality. My road was wider because of them. With growing confidence I settled into the driver's seat. But something was missing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Remarkable that it took six months for one of them to die. Two of them in fact, on the same day -- April 5, shortly before my birthday.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I had a case study due that afternoon, and in the morning I sat down for the first time to write of death. I had learned and owned the template, and I knew how to identify the issues and knock out the document in an hour or two. I wrote for twenty minutes, and then stopped; and to my great surprise, I wept. I'm not a weepy guy, and I hadn't seen it coming, but there it was. I don't say that I cried, or blubbered. I say that, in a formal and retro way, I wept. My eyes filled, my breathing became heavy, and wet blobs rolled down my face. I couldn't say why. I couldn't think.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">So I pulled myself together, wiped my face, focussed on the screen, and spilled my thoughts once again into the template. And I stopped again, and wept.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And so it went. Write and weep, weep and write.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I was not collapsing: hadn't really thought I would, but you can't know until it happens, can you? Instead there was this strangely formal leakage.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Manuel had come as a young man from Cuba, and lived on people skills that did not require an education; had driven a taxi, had been a doorman. My teacher said Manuel was "seductive," and now he was reckoning with the fruits of his charm. He had womanized, and his wife had left him. Now his daughter was his caregiver, and before daughter and God he felt the guilt. He learned to talk to his daughter, but not to God. "I don't know how to pray," he said, with terror in his eyes. So I modeled simplicity with him -- you don't have to be fancy, I said, or use big words; just say what is on your heart. As I was leaving for what I did not know was the last time, he said "God bless you." And then he said "I love you." He was, after all, seductive.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Millicent was gentle and appreciative. She was fading out, more transparent every time I saw her. Her skin looked like tracing paper. I arranged for the priest to see her, and she couldn't remember he had come. The last time I saw her, she looked at her hand and said "There's nothing left." And I said, "But your heart is beating." She looked at me and said "Do you want to feel my heart beating?" Of course I said yes. She took my hand and placed it under her own, on the bones of her rib cage, and I could in fact still feel the beating of her heart.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Manuel and Millicent had opened doors and let me into their stories. Now those doors were shut, and the stories were perfect. They had reached full cadence and there was no part left for me, not a note. My teacher said they had canonized me. I was weeping, and the grief was sweet to me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">*<i>Good Bones </i>(North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2017), p. 4.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">**<i>Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End</i> (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014), p. 7.</span><br />
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Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-60231010012856400852017-09-30T10:13:00.005-04:002017-09-30T11:43:35.443-04:00like bread<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Creo que el mundo es bello,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">que la poesia es como el pan, de todos.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I believe the world is beautiful</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Roque Dalton, "Como tĂş," trans. Jack Hirschman*</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Human beings are not to live on bread alone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Matthew 4:4 (ASV)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Poetry feeds us. Poetry fills the void. Poetry keeps us alive. Poetry makes it possible to get out of bed in the morning.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga-K3SxFEI4UxyYoWMjeqV3wBvxZWWkSWFi2zAkeaKLeQ3SH-KuKrMaZ-GiuuvBmMnaVqpZU8xo7SwVTcDbw-qPrEkbDvE08qZ9Si_btMHCXkejyGyC9oUIDptPLi6tttGuQ37sH9W7w0/s1600/Bread.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1178" data-original-width="1600" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga-K3SxFEI4UxyYoWMjeqV3wBvxZWWkSWFi2zAkeaKLeQ3SH-KuKrMaZ-GiuuvBmMnaVqpZU8xo7SwVTcDbw-qPrEkbDvE08qZ9Si_btMHCXkejyGyC9oUIDptPLi6tttGuQ37sH9W7w0/s320/Bread.jpg" width="320" /></span></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the beginning was the sound, but when sound became word there was song. A long time ago there was no boundary between singers and poets, and still today there are times and places where the word is a sound and not just a mark on papyrus. When song comes into being, the problem of meaning cannot appear, because in song there is always something to do and an urgent need to do it. The song makes us move. It makes us move <i>here</i>, not just anywhere. It makes us sound <i>this note</i>, not any other. It makes us move <i>now</i>, not in the future or the past. The right note at the wrong time is obscene -- you're standing on the dock with your expensive ring, and your lover's ship has sailed. So when there is song, there is simply no time for despair. Even if the song is about despair, you cannot despair while singing it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">If you despair, you've stopped singing. If you can't sing, you're in despair. People die in despair, and of despair. Those old guys whose wives of sixty years have died, who tell me, "I don't know how to live without her," should be taken at their word. Their lives </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">are in danger, because she was their song and they don't have another one.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And when we stop singing, there is much to despair about. We are here only briefly, and though some will remember us, they themselves will be forgotten. History is mostly an entrainment of one damn thing after another, of cruelties followed by betrayals, greeds by lusts, addictions by aggressions and pomps by poxes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Our intricate bodies seem designed as a practical joke. We can choke to death because our breathing and swallowing conflict at the larynx. We vibrate between disgust and desire because God has tangled our organs of excretion and orgasm, so not only were we born <i>inter faeces et urinam</i>, but we return to die of love there, midst joy and stink, over and over. There, I've done it. I've mentioned God, who if involved in anything would seem implicated in these wrappers, these structured sacks of blood and bone in which we lurch, churning the substance of our souls. I'm convinced that, if something corresponding to the word <i>God</i> exists, it laughs, but in this respect the great designer seems to snicker behind its almighty hand.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">At work I hear the songs of my people. Sometimes I sing them back. <i>The Lord arrives just in time</i>, they say. <i>He won't burden you with more than you can bear</i>. But I know of many people who were broken before their carriage arrived. And who am I to say that those crushed by the world should be able to bear it?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Now here I touch the boundary of faith. How is it, knowing how soon I'll be obliterated, that I get up this morning to fill this page with words? And you, to write on the page that is this day of yours? This question obsesses me. A colleague said that he gets out of bed for his first cup of coffee, but I think he only postpones the question. I also need my hit of caffeine, but for what? the drug is just a tool, and if it didn't take me beyond itself I would lose the habit.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Pretty soon after waking we start singing, or else we stay in bed. This is where faith engages us. Faith is the song that makes it possible to endure our utter insignificance in the factual scale of things. Light from the second nearest star takes four and half years to reach us, and that distance is less than paltry in the enormity of galaxy, and our galaxy is swallowed by its local cluster, and so on . . . <i>Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!</i> wrote Shelley, postponing his own despair for the time of writing, and ours for the time of reading, or of speaking again for the thousandth time as I just did.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Faith is beneath reason. And theology, because it tries to give rational account of faith, is as dangerous as high explosive. Its statements are constantly concretizing, turning into stones for us to hurl at each other. Thus our Unitarian disdain for creeds, which we share with some other denominations of Protestant heritage. But even we who shrink from creeds can catch the plague of ideology, theology that does not know itself, ready to inspire crimes because finally, finally we subscribers have shed the Illusions and know The Truth, and knowing Truth we are authorized to dictate words and thoughts, and hurl the proper stones at those who speak differently.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Theology gives faith a bad name. The great slaughters inflamed by concretized theology are the stuff of history and the cable news.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">What does not make the papers is the work of faith in all lives and on all days, calling us to better selves, dragging us out of muck and into worlds of spirit, making beauty and love by singing it, summoning patience to bear what must be born, courage to change what should be changed, and wisdom to discern the difference. When my people say <i>The Lord always arrives just in time</i>, they are not writing a tome of history. They are not asserting that bad stuff does not happen. They are not asserting. Period. They are singing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This is what militant atheism misses. You can of course look throughout the universe and time, and not find a fact that is God. To notice this is to play at high stakes with doubt, a kind of provisional atheism where I sometimes live. Duh. So what? God is not a fact. God is a song. Fundamentalist and atheist alike overlook the category where life occurs. If what enables life is real, then the song is real.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A little child shall lead us, and poetry shall feed us like loaves of bread.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">*<i>Poetry Like Bread,</i> ed. MartĂn Espada (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2000), pp. 128-9.</span><br />
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Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-67513902085970263442017-09-04T16:22:00.000-04:002017-09-04T19:04:16.594-04:00masque neutre<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">An election is not about self-expression.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Mark Lilla, on </span><i style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', serif;">The New Yorker Radio Hour</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> (August 26, 2017)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I don't feel no ways tired, I've come too far from where I started from.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- spiritual</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There are only three important words: justice, truth and love.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Rev. C. T. Vivian</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This photograph changed the nation.</span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4V2cuYt3AMh_Z6kgNnT-IemQdtj-5HcQ1AlbzU_49O2JEbIq_2lqhcD08qjtWPMiKe8EcuRjcGutBR6CeVwPNJUAisXVlihoI_82onJrYaZyLcSbVOEIBgz60GAFiGKflC1_MutRpw4E/s1600/eckford.photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="498" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4V2cuYt3AMh_Z6kgNnT-IemQdtj-5HcQ1AlbzU_49O2JEbIq_2lqhcD08qjtWPMiKe8EcuRjcGutBR6CeVwPNJUAisXVlihoI_82onJrYaZyLcSbVOEIBgz60GAFiGKflC1_MutRpw4E/s320/eckford.photo.jpg" width="316" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Photo by Will Counts, Sept. 4, 1957</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Elizabeth Eckford, not yet sixteen years old, followed by a white mob who might have beaten her if not for the presence of news photographers, has attempted to enroll at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. She has been refused entrance, and now she is retreating to what she hopes will be safety. She carries a notebook. She is a student who wishes to learn. A lamb among lions, innocent child threading an isthmus of sin, focus of white eyes, she stares straight ahead.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">No face is more poisoned than that of Hazel Bryan, also only fifteen years old, shrieking epithets from the center of the frame. Eckford's face however is a blank. I must think that she was feeling many things: fear, grief, anger -- but none of these passions register on her face. Bryan and the mob are expressing themselves. Eckford, by her courage and discipline, is accomplishing much, but one thing she is not doing is expressing herself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The grand strategy of protest was to unmask the violence inherent in the system. Emotions of the righteous protesters were not the point, and were not on display. If Eckford had broken down in tears, it would only have intensified the violence. Any expression of her outrage and anger might have gotten her killed, or would at least have turned a <i>welthistorische </i>photograph into the record of a shouting match between two teen-agers. This was the template of the classical Civil Rights era: to contrast the calm dignity of black protesters with the threats, assaults and open malice of white people.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Let's not be sentimental about this, or we'll misunderstand. This was not a matter of being nice so that the oppressors would be nice in return. There would be no melting of hearts. The oppressors would not be nice. The emotional discipline of these protests was a strategy, calculated to reveal the malice of oppression on faces that lacked discipline to conceal it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">So when black students sat down three years later at Woolworth's segregated lunch counters in Nashville and Greensboro, they did not come there to express their emotions. And when, almost eight years after the Battle of Little Rock, six hundred people walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday, they did not come to express their emotions. When violence came to these people, it was because of their actions, not because of their feelings. They had come there to act and to endure the consequence, captured on film without mixture.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">These protests were actions rather than passions. The actions were brilliantly, strategically chosen. The principalities and powers could not let Elizabeth Eckford enter the high school, or let black students sit at the lunch counter, or let six hundred people march from Selma to Montgomery, without losing their authority; so they had to respond, and because there was no righteous option their response could only be violent. These incisive actions had grabbed oppression by the short hairs.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRxsd9eOPjwvWTJj84NwngUB5jh2FT_JWOLbkOZInznGxzxoa1Zsi-mfQijsFlKFDJyYkwP0hkJaAiKHEeU7FyX3JW5abcVdFrffdRabBw90jQJr3RTjF9DZ1gs1fnqk6dncXvhkfwfR4/s1600/masque.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="259" data-original-width="194" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRxsd9eOPjwvWTJj84NwngUB5jh2FT_JWOLbkOZInznGxzxoa1Zsi-mfQijsFlKFDJyYkwP0hkJaAiKHEeU7FyX3JW5abcVdFrffdRabBw90jQJr3RTjF9DZ1gs1fnqk6dncXvhkfwfR4/s200/masque.jpeg" width="149" /></span></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I was trained in the French theatrical tradition of a <i>masque neutre</i>, a face ready to respond to the present because it is unmarked by the past. You and I of course are marked by the past, but you try to respond to the thing in front of you rather than to history; it's a training in presence. If you succeed in dropping your dramas and traumas, then the currents, the sounds, the textures, the lights and spaces, the swirling passions of others are revealed. Eckford's <i>masque neutre </i>was the clean lens that projected the violence of others.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There are historical passions behind these movements -- centuries of grief, of mourning, of righteous prophetic anger, of waiting for the Day of the Lord when justice would roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. But the actions don't speak -- they act. They grab injustice in a place where it hurts.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">On the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday I walked with five hundred Unitarians and a hundred thousand other Americans across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In the days before, we were visited by great artists of protest, including Rev. William Barber and Rev. C. T. Vivian.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Vivian spoke with charm, candor and wit about the Freedom Rides, the Lunch Counter Protests, the Voting Rights Marches, the front and backstages of the campaign. A young protester asked him what it was that, half a century ago, had made victories possible, "so that [and here there was a sigh] we don't all feel so exhausted."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the pause, this is what I thought. <i>I'm not surprised you're exhausted. It's hard work expressing yourself. Coming into the streets every day and evening saying I'm here and I'm black or Latino or queer or poor and you've wronged us and we're angry and you should stop, can wear you out. And the powers can outlast you. To them your righteous sentiments and justified anger are abstractions. They're getting paid overtime. Their patience is greater than yours. They can wait. You haven't got them by the short hairs.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">C. T. Vivian said, as I remember, that the movement was repeatedly saved by its strategy, discipline and music.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It seems to me the songs are yet missing, songs that people of different generations, ethnicities and classes can sing together. Could we perhaps sing "Joe Hill", or "We Shall Overcome," without fighting about who created the song and which culture it belongs to and who has the right to sing it and with what apologies to whom? Can we remember what such songs once meant? And can we use them to unite rather than to divide? But perhaps new songs will emerge. Let us hope. They're not here yet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And the strategies are absent without leave. Strategies that from the first moment put powers and principalities on the back foot, exposing the violence inherent in the system. To say who you are and how angry you are and what you demand and on what day, requiring potential allies to speak from your vocabulary list with your precise talking points, is not a strategy. Where is the direct action -- the action beneath and beyond speech -- that forces a response?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Today's exhausted protesters should study the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Though that action grew from decades of outrage, the execution of it was an exercise in patience, persistence and obedience, shrewd calculation and military discipline. At its center, augmenting the willingness of some persons to walk rather than ride in the back of the bus, was an alternative volunteer transportation system, using over three hundred vehicles for three hundred eighty-one days. There were timetables, commitments, commanders and soldiers. There wasn't, I think, much time for self-expression. Not even the choice of Rosa Parks as the spark of the boycott was spontaneous. She was one of several persons who had been arrested for protesting bus segregation, the one selected as a suitable figurehead. That community then withdrew its money from the bus company. The soldiers of justice didn't have to express themselves every day, because every day they had the oppressor by the short hairs.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I don't know what the new direct actions will be. I am waiting for them to emerge. They will be the kind of thing people can do without expressing themselves. People will be welcome to do them even if they don't come from our social location, even if they don't talk the way we talk. It won't matter how we talk; talk would be a distraction. The action itself, measured by the song, will be the thing.</span><br />
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<br />Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-44864066173980234862017-08-12T15:20:00.004-04:002017-09-04T18:06:29.853-04:00bad word<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span name="myContent" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us, and not done by us.</span></div>
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<span name="myContent" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Emerson, "History"</span></div>
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<span name="myContent" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the mind of Thomas Bowdler (1754 - 1825), Cordelia could not die. Bowdler could not live in a world where innocence is so reviled. So when he edited Shakespeare, he altered the data, and gave his name forever to acts of cleaning up the past so we could feel better about it. As one who would in a fallen world act justly, I cannot bowdlerize. I must own my past in its horror as well in its beauty.</span></div>
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<span name="myContent" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">My quarrel with the Society for Creative Anachronism is that they squeeze history like a lime to get a drop or two of juice, and then serve up the sweetness as a truth. In their world, everybody is at least a duke (or duchess), and the thousands whose wretched existence enables their dancing and jousting are flushed from sight like so much pulp. Nor in these simulations of nobility is there any account of their filth and stink, their rotting teeth and arsenic-pocked faces.</span></div>
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<span name="myContent" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I do love the art that rises from the muck of these ancient times, the poems and songs, the sculpture and architecture, the glass windows and microscopically intricate books of hours. The artifacts speak to me, strangely modern. I have come to think that our Enlightened view of the person, its interiority and sacrality, was born in the fantasy life of those landed pirates, who lived on stolen vitality and could afford to build a chamber for themselves and close its door. The notion of human rights is a multiply sublimated product of class envy.</span></div>
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<span name="myContent" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And yet we cannot live without universal human rights. Any regime that renounces them is a roller coaster to hell. You and I can't talk about justice without presupposing that every person's rights are unalienable. Otherwise it's just you against me, my fist against your knife, my big brother against your bigger one, my gun against your missile, until we all are dead or wish we were. Whether we measure up to justice as we talk about it -- well, that's a different matter, isn't it? When did that ever happen?</span></div>
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<span name="myContent" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Therefore, though I am obliged to accept the noble heritage of humanity, as an adult human being I must also own the stink and rot. Otherwise I might imagine I am noble. No surgeon can separate the rights of persons from the primacy of sin.</span></div>
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<span name="myContent" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Therefore I will not bowdlerize history. I will not whitewash the record of my people's sins.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span name="myContent">There is a word I must not say because it was born in the malice of my people, and the saying of it by people like me encompasses centuries of abuse, violence and terror. But I must maintain the record of its use. I must not say the word, but sometimes I must quote it. </span>I cannot tell my children, "There is a word you must never speak, and I won't tell you what it is."</span></div>
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<span name="myContent" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself
up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn’t
ever sorry for it afterward, neither.</span></div>
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<span name="myContent" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- <i>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</i></span><br />
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By putting <i>nigger</i> in white characters' mouths, the author is not branding blacks, but rather branding the whites.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Randall Kennedy, <i>Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word</i></span></div>
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<span name="myContent" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I must not let the word be erased from history. We must know that it has been spoken and written, and continues to be so. We must know its harm, even though knowing its harm is painful. Painful to you, my sib of color, but painful to me as well. And yes I know that my pain with the word is not the same as your pain, not as mortal in its wound. But it is my pain, and I lie if I conceal it. I eschew the bad word not only because saying it would be wrong, but also because the word hurts me. It hurts me that people who look like me, from whom I inherit genes and privileges, obtained their gifts so viciously.</span><br />
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<span name="myContent">What, I ask, would we achieve if we could expunge from all historic records, all novels and poems, each occurrence of the bad word? Then our children would not know what you, and we sometimes together, have struggled for. They would not know the poisons that pervade our land, the toxin that now rises from the swamp of ignorance and privation. They would say, <i>what in the world are you so concerned about, silly grandpa? Grandma, why this talk of revolution? </i></span><span name="myContent">The past is always disappointing, never to be adored. There is no trigger warning adequate for this: t</span>o meet the past is thrilling, and dangerous, and terrifying. It gives us life and drags us down to death.</span><br />
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<span name="myContent">If I write a Western story, and in my story Bad Bart comes to town and robs the bank, that does not make me a bank-robber, nor does it make me an advocate of bank-robbing. Anyone who said so would reveal himself as an incompetent reader. Bad Bart is not me. Bad Bart is imaginary, and evil.</span></span><br />
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<span name="myContent">So if Sam Clemens tells the story of an abused and ignorant boy growing up in a two-bit town in the slave-state of Missouri, and if that boy speaks of his enslaved companion by the word I cannot say, that does not make Sam Clemens a racist or a sympathizer of racism. Huck Finn is not Sam Clemens. Huck Finn is imaginary, and ignorant.</span></span><br />
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<span name="myContent" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">If Huck did not use the bad words of his time and place, the story would be worthless, as phony as a three-dollar bill. <i>Then</i> the story would be complacent and racist.</span><br />
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<span name="myContent">The best thing about Huck Finn is that he runs away. He carries with him the ignorance, hypocrisy and moral inversion of the town he has escaped from. </span>Wherever you go, there you are. <span name="myContent">Adrift on the river, his companion a man that immoral laws had made a piece of property, he learns that his right place before that man may be humility. </span>Huck never achieves perfection, nor does his author. But the resistance of Huck and Sam to the nation's original sin is one of the reasons why their story has been revered, not only by Americans but by authors from other shores as well.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span name="myContent">In the house of my father the radical pastor the bad word was forbidden. We were taught with rigor that other, respectful word: "Negro." This distinction was one of the sacred values of our home, setting us above the saeculum, the world ruled by those who "didn't know any better." It was a distinction not only of morals but of class as well. So in my genteel Yankee childhood and youth, I never heard the word except as a prohibition, or a shocking evidence of sin. But </span>when we went south, to visit the rural half of the family, I met itinerant black laborers and tenant farmers and their families, who worked on my grandpa's land. Some of the white farmers would speak the bad word in the raw, but for the most part my family spoke of "Nigg-ruhs."</span><br />
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<span name="myContent">In that neologism can be read the history of the south, its white folk still angry from the Reconstruction, soon to be placed under federal authority by the Voting Rights Act. <i>You don't know these people,</i> they were saying<i>. We've lived with them for centuries; and we'll be damned before we'll say that word you Yankees are so proud of. "Nee-grow," you say. We'll keep our distance from white trash all right, but we'll keep distance from you as well, Galahad, with a word that's neither fish nor fowl. "Nigg-ruh." Put that in your pipe and smoke it.</i></span></span><br />
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<span name="myContent">Compliant and defiant at the same time, they told their history: the romance of a misguided Reconstruction that had awarded franchise and property rights to people who "were not ready." From that inevitable chaos and corruption all had been rescued, they taught, by mercies of the Klan and Plessy v. Ferguson.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span name="myContent"><br /></span><span name="myContent">Now in my Yankee old adulthood, the word is still not in my vocabulary. </span>I never hear it in my house, or in my social and professional circles, but I hear it on the street, and in the subway, and in front of the bodega. Those who speak the word around me are black men.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And I've heard the word from a generation of black comedians, and I hear it in the fiction and the drama of black authors.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span name="myContent"><br /></span><span name="myContent">I know the word's use by some black people is a grief to others. It is a grief to me as well, though for special white reasons that lack authority. I</span>t is respectful to assume that my brothers and sisters know what they are doing, choose their words for a purpose, and achieve something by their choice. Perhaps they are drawing distinctions among themselves. Or perhaps, like gays who call themselves "queer," they are bleeding the word of its toxin, making it familiar and affectionate in their mouths. Perhaps they are universalizing the black experience, making it definitive in the place of epic whiteness. Not for me to say, though as ally I cannot fail to take an interest.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">That the word hurts me is perhaps a side benefit. If I'm a grownup, I'll handle it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below, clicking on the world "comment(s)."</span>Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-30964828726152544422017-08-10T23:21:00.000-04:002017-11-25T01:34:07.768-05:00island flickers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">from the island</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">. . . writing </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">compensates</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> for nothing, . . . is precisely there where you are not.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">-- Roland Barthes*</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">island flickers</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">(from Christine's words</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">on yes an island)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">somewhere else you speak</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">mediated face a screen</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">flickers on a phone</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">no don’t look not now</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">eyes shut to breathe the world in</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">hummingbird at nose</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">chatter flutter stop</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">squirrel in his tree suspends</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">hawk is on the move</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">far shore feathered now</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">crossing channel light in light</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">rises mist on</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> dusk</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">*<i>A Lover's Discourse: Fragments</i>, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), p. 100.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I encourage readers to leave a comment by clicking on the word "comment(s)" below.</span></span></div>
Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-48272300464588613492017-07-24T14:04:00.000-04:002017-07-24T14:11:36.152-04:00vain hair<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik9DELV0e-yiEbh7kI7Vfc9p3cOY6-sKV8XuB1BDOHS6W26-mKtY4nXz2nskzF9CvOB-YqXoQNVTbpGkccJBk9sNODyZ8KKtSoopqBL6CdRvO-OjJK7brRnYVJbobbVeONzjczhdswe14/s1600/curly+hair.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="929" data-original-width="1050" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik9DELV0e-yiEbh7kI7Vfc9p3cOY6-sKV8XuB1BDOHS6W26-mKtY4nXz2nskzF9CvOB-YqXoQNVTbpGkccJBk9sNODyZ8KKtSoopqBL6CdRvO-OjJK7brRnYVJbobbVeONzjczhdswe14/s320/curly+hair.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">What a falling off was there!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- <i>Hamlet,</i> I. v.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I talk to my hair with oils</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I say today I need you to curl</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And when I style you,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Stay in place, do not spoil!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Sylvia Chidi*</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I am letting down my hair -- it's fed up with me, and it's leaving. My scalp is complaisant and lets go of it. Not in clumps, but strand by strand. There's a fuzz of short light-colored follicles in my comb.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I'm vain of it, my hair. There's quite a bit left, with a natural wave and some original color. The doctor told me this would happen: the chemical they pump into me every three weeks goes after fast-growing cells, and hair follicles grow fast. The exodus, plotted for three months, is now.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I'm more or less okay with the plumping and sagging face, the scooping flesh under my eyes, the flop under my chin disrupting my noble profile. But these strands of hair, out of their place, speak to me of what is lost. Sometimes, standing its ground on my cranium, my hair has caused a casual observer to mistake my age.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjh3wEhl9ElzkeLE8MSDdgn9w6txqqiC4ecrXa1VEu0flBpjurJD0dQLRNhYWjDUxW0aL1EEbdtIF93kuJ27vs1uvIsSTB8gkN1lE57yVPqcYhUnNJqfEARhQi1xHVgQqWncIqDlxj1Yg/s1600/Hair+in+comb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="594" data-original-width="1600" height="147" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjh3wEhl9ElzkeLE8MSDdgn9w6txqqiC4ecrXa1VEu0flBpjurJD0dQLRNhYWjDUxW0aL1EEbdtIF93kuJ27vs1uvIsSTB8gkN1lE57yVPqcYhUnNJqfEARhQi1xHVgQqWncIqDlxj1Yg/s400/Hair+in+comb.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Why is this a big deal? This is the inevitable consequence of a self-care campaign, a </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">soldier's fight irrelevant to the objective, mere </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">roadside incident in what friends call my "journey." And certainly not the most serious incident but a cosmetic distraction, froth of the underlying churn. <i>Keep moving, nothing to see here.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But that's just it. This is something to see, an announcement of visceral combat. It has that meaning to those who know me. Nothing unusual for the bystander in a seventy-year old man with thinning hair (though now I am exposed in my seventyness); but there <i>is</i> something unusual in <i>me</i> with thinning hair. The bystander doesn't know what is wrong, but I do.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This is something to see. For other signs of the struggle there are strategies of camouflage and concealment, selective presentation and tasteful retreat. Or I can tough it out with more or less success, though this doesn't work with a companion who knows me well. But this is right up there on top of my head, where the flag of my dominion flies. My flag is in tatters.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I suppose I could wear a hat. But what hat?</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcRL5rULnuCoUVNkyI0bOMZWc0h1CbimdjunkXHg65MN-hwVp9v2_v3CCfVfDbunHXWy9j1mwm4Fb_Z7UPRmMVLdhAsL1WhZfuwe1nr_Jr2KIKITzuHOhWsixxyVfBq0qrH-cZxQYOc50/s1600/Loomishat.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1237" data-original-width="1600" height="307" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcRL5rULnuCoUVNkyI0bOMZWc0h1CbimdjunkXHg65MN-hwVp9v2_v3CCfVfDbunHXWy9j1mwm4Fb_Z7UPRmMVLdhAsL1WhZfuwe1nr_Jr2KIKITzuHOhWsixxyVfBq0qrH-cZxQYOc50/s400/Loomishat.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But I've never had a good relationship with a hat.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And a hat is the giveaway that a chemo patient is losing hair.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But then not everybody knows I am a chemo patient.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I could just be an old guy with a hat. But I don't want to be "just an old guy."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This is all about me, isn't it? I am the auditor who is disappointed. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: medium;">*"I Love My Hair"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: medium;">I encourage readers to leave a comment by clicking on the word "comment(s)" below.</span>Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-36876266108074685662017-07-04T12:27:00.004-04:002017-07-05T09:28:54.475-04:00american tumor<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In Adams's fall</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We sinned all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- New England Primer</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">He plays extravagant matches . .</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">.. On a cloth untrue,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">With a twisted cue,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And elliptical billiard balls.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- W. S. Gilbert, <i>The Mikado</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">People who live good lives, they're healthy . . .</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Rep. Mo Brooks, May 1, 2017</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHS0mRW8wBirzKlYOugUNFK0yaTzEQIYzmvjunTWD0WpKs17x9QrBuYx2vSEcVO1d7k596LKn6i2Ya6wMqMNXvJRY9qO9gwLr4QufjOr9vkmmpGfj6xAOdN3phA5y00p09KtwVnABMEgI/s1600/IMG_0315.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="250" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHS0mRW8wBirzKlYOugUNFK0yaTzEQIYzmvjunTWD0WpKs17x9QrBuYx2vSEcVO1d7k596LKn6i2Ya6wMqMNXvJRY9qO9gwLr4QufjOr9vkmmpGfj6xAOdN3phA5y00p09KtwVnABMEgI/s1600/IMG_0315.JPG" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><br /></i>Because I work in health care, I know that what I sit in is called a geri-chair, though its more formal name is "medical recliner." It's padded, hard to fall out of, and tilts back. The remote control of a flat screen is at my right shoulder, hanging by its cable from the back of the chair; so I have a universe of entertainment before me, as a gracious nurse inserts her needle into the veteran and often-punctured vein on the inside of my right elbow and establishes an intravenous line. After a few short infusions of introductory drugs, one of which makes me euphoric, she begins the main event: the hour-long drip of a substance that kills cells, some though not all of which are the cells that, if left to themselves, will kill me. I do this every three weeks. I've done it four times now, and depending on how things go I'll do it three or maybe five times more.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The first time I did this, in my drug-induced high, with a remote in my hand and a window before me showing, through a frosted sylvan design like that of a Belvedere Vodka bottle, a larger room of nurses and screens and controls, I said I felt like I was on the bridge of the <i>Enterprise</i>. More often I just feel lucky.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I receive my gifts in the entrails of a medical research center, and two high-priced doctors work for my welfare, with their assistants and specialized nurses. I'm enrolled in two research protocols, so I am scanned and sampled and tracked, and all my information is kept in a single system. Most astounding of all however is the money, most of it for drugs, untold amounts of which fly over my head in cyberspace, only droplets of which fall on me as co-pays, virtually nothing. I'm getting all of this, close as dammit, for free. I'm lucky.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">To say I am lucky is a theological statement, a defiance of the dominant theology of our time, which says <i>I've got mine so I deserve it and the rest of you be damned. </i>The ruling theology of America now is damn-the-poor theology, damn-the-unfortunate theology, grab-everything-that-ain't-bolted-down-and-run-for-the-hills theology, a looter's theology. It would be easy to join in. It would be easy for me to say I deserve the gifts I am getting, that I'm smart and worked hard, earned my degrees and certifications and picked a final career with a health-care agency that out of sheer moral compulsion would provide excellent medical insurance, and then I managed not to get fired or laid off for twelve years. These were smart things to do, and required work. It would be so easy to say, I deserve what I have, it's my right. As if my life were worth preserving at such expense -- which would be to say it is priceless.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And it ought to be my right. Medical care is a human right, and the medical profession knows it. All attempts to treat medical care as a consumer good are confounded when an uninsured person comes in the door of an emergency room. Such people cannot pay and they cannot, by ethics of medicine, be refused, so they are cared for briefly and sent bills of a size beyond their capacity, which we the public pick up in our insurance premiums. In denying our biblical responsibility to care for our neighbors, we smack ourselves in the face with greater penalties. This is not just greed but worse. It's stupidity.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">An uninsured person at the emergency room is not like a poor person presenting himself at the Beamer showroom. Those who can't afford a Beamer don't get one: they live without a Beamer, which is perfectly possible. There isn't any human right to a Beamer. But those who can't afford medical care for the condition I live with will die of it. There is a human right to medical care.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The care I receive should come to me by right, but is only a privilege. In my work I meet people who are dying of what I live with, and might not be dying if they had been cared for as I am being cared for. These are not wastrels and rascals. Many are as smart and worked at least as hard as I have, but didn't have my luck. Their lives under God's eye are as priceless as mine, but they didn't get what I have.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This is iniquitous. The gifts I receive are poisoned fruits of a toxic tree. The American tumor dressed up as a medical system eats at the souls of all who encounter it. It is the best working model, for Christians and Unitarians, believers and atheists, of original sin. There are no right angles or straight lines or level floors. We play on a cloth untrue, striking as best we can elliptical billiard balls, and we ourselves are the twisted cues. We're smart and work hard, and have the best intentions, but we play for a system, and systems preserve themselves. It's as if someone, a long time ago, an original human being perhaps, did something terrible -- so terrible that it distorts all space and time, warping our motives in all dimensions. This is what we used to call the Fallen World.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Do I refuse the poisoned fruits offered me? Of course not. I preserve my life, which seems precious to me and to those who love me. But the life I preserve is tainted with a sinfulness bigger than my fault, and in working for the good of others through a tainted system I confirm the slanting of the world; but there are no untainted systems.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And yet we must be good. The Fallen World must be made beautiful.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When we twisted creatures join together to do good it's more miracle than arithmetic. And we must pray for miracles each day, not in some remote future when we've all become pure and all our companions in justice are spotless. Such waiting for purity is procrastination.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I fear that my religious dis-organization is falling into procrastination, into the joy of inquisition against those who we know will not strike back because they were trying, imperfectly, to help. There is no ideology and no vocabulary list that will save our country, or save us within it. If we're going to turn the tide we'll need partners who wouldn't have done well at the recent brie-and-chablis party. We must form alliances with some who haven't become comfortable with our words for racial and other injustice. If we win, our hands will get soil on them. We'll need the vision of that wealthy bankrupt sinner who wrote that all human beings are created equal. We'll need that proclamation from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25.* We'll need <i>both</i> Liberation Theology <i>and</i> Enlightenment, imperfect as both human thought-scapes must be.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">As for me, I forget ideologies and vocabulary lists every time I go to work in my ministry. I have to work at a deeper, less intellectual level. People are dying and people are grieving, and many of them are poorer than me, and many are of colors darker than the deep pinkness of my northern European extraction, and if I started speaking the language of Unitarian justice debates they would throw me out of the room. My appearance represents those who have done injuries to such people, and my ministry depends on their forgiveness -- forgiveness that, miraculously, is frequently extended, and not because I am free of sin.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">"Any decent realtor," writes the poet Maggie Smith, "walking you through a real shithole, chirps on/about good bones." </span><span style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', serif; font-size: large;">When we struggled against Nixon, the pathological and lawless president of an earlier time, we relied on Sam Ervin, a white Southern segregationist senator, to lead the resistance. Think about that, ideologues. I guess the good old boy had good bones. "This place could be beautiful, right?"**</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">*25:31-46</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">**Maggie Smith, "Good Bones"</span><br />
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<br />Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-54760405986762265422017-06-27T18:05:00.002-04:002017-09-05T12:47:08.384-04:00male gazer<div style="border: 0px; color: #404040; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1em; text-align: center; text-indent: -1em; vertical-align: baseline;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_GLmpkstFPAw88uBy-5dauoZ4Z-JdySuHQHRmq8M-XWaZUJg8wIqVCaJWrb1V2In1oARxzNvVuiVlF1BhPmPDH_Eg4ajrHQtUbOLVsvFBD3a-g9oJ9phBUs0cCsXe9ZhIXaLkr9lNTIs/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_GLmpkstFPAw88uBy-5dauoZ4Z-JdySuHQHRmq8M-XWaZUJg8wIqVCaJWrb1V2In1oARxzNvVuiVlF1BhPmPDH_Eg4ajrHQtUbOLVsvFBD3a-g9oJ9phBUs0cCsXe9ZhIXaLkr9lNTIs/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">. . . as you were when first your eye I eyed, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Such seems your beauty still. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Shakespeare, Sonnet 104 (1609)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I realized that, in this world, there would be many instances when my body would not feel like my body.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Heather Burtman, New York <i>Times (</i>June 16, 2017)*</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: -1em;">I'm a man. I'm straight. Even when I was an unhappy straight man, I knew there was no alternative role, no other kind of creature I could be, because t</span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -24px;">here is no question which portion of humankind attracts me.</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -24px;"> </span><span style="font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: -1em;">I look. </span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -24px;">Science says that men are visual creatures, and o</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;">ld age is no cure. I'm an old straight man. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -24px;">Any relationship based on the notion that I am some other kind of creature would be a house built on sand.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;">"When you're a star, they let you do it."** Women are in danger from men who look and reach, who see with their hands and their physical strength, making an empire of vision. There are too many assaults, violations, gropings, catcalls; but even short of violence the male gaze, they tell me, tramples a woman's agency, marks her like a terrain to be colonized, a piece of meat to be carved. And I am male, and I gaze.</span><br />
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<span style="text-indent: -1em;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> I must resolve the contradiction. </span></span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;">I must see, but I must not own what I see. I look, but my look must meet the consent of another gaze. </span><span style="text-indent: -1em;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This is, as Kant would say, categorical: no woman exists as a means to my pleasure (nor of course do I exist as a means to hers). I suspect that women do their share of looking, though they are less often on the upper side of a power differential. The gaze must be mutual and continuously responsive, a kind of utilitarian duet whose pleasure, if there is pleasure, arises not from body parts or instruments but from the concert of all. My look dwells nowhere, for there is no home where I look, only a provisional permission. Keep moving. <i>My eyes</i>, goes the joke, <i>are up here</i>. </span></span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;">This is a principle I have always known, but I was not taught how to live with it, and the world taught me its contradiction.</span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: -1em;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> In the David Lean movie <i>Summertime</i>, released in 1955, Rossano Brazzi gazes at Katherine Hepburn across the Piazza San Marco, appraising her like a sculpture. The Ohio schoolteacher, </span></span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;">discomfited and denuded with her clothes on,</span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;"> </span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;">braving a place where American conventionalities are suspended, did not intend to be a spectacle. The gaze provokes an affair. Though there is no act of force, the man exploits a power differential, his Machiavellian skill against her solitariness. The seduction is exposed when she learns he is a married man with a family right there in Venice. <i>This may be how you do things in Venice</i>, she concludes; <i>but I'm from Ohio and it isn't how I carry myself</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: -1em;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: -1em;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> I was eight years old when <i>Summertime</i> was in the theaters. The s</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">eduction and betrayal, beginning in the male gaze, was presented with favor. We are to notice that the schoolteacher is traveling alone: she is a spinster, and the seducer is doing a good deed. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: -1em;">Rossano Brazzi represented a middle term, unattainable by American men, of the universal message -- that women were to be perused, pursued, taken and possessed. He doesn't take the woman by force, which we all knew was a crime. His second way, by Venetian polish and deceit, was far beyond our capabilities. In our dreams! So what third way was left for respectable men? Hard to describe -- it seems to have gone by the name "respect." Opening of doors, pulling out of chairs, protection from harsh realities, combined with the right hair cream, discreet boasting, and promises of good providing for herself and hers. But the purpose was to pursue and capture, own and dominate. We were so alone.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;"> This definition of a man's relation to women corrupted the youth into competition. There were a few who seemed to be winners and the rest, observing the evident winners, came to see themselves as losers. If you couldn't capture and possess, if you couldn't display trophies of conquest, you were exposed, and your mates might say you were queer. (That was the definition in those days -- a "queer" was a a failed heterosexual.) The most respectable trophy of manhood was a wedding, but the more common trophy was the narrative of progress on a four-base scale, of notches on one's gun, the communal soiling of reputation, a race to ruin characters by betrayal or by outright lying. If you weren't a winner you were a loser: the only cure for your defect was somehow to recover your "confidence" (for the winners were said to be always confident, and confidence was what opened doors and bodies). You were supposed to carry Vivienne Leigh up the staircase despite her wishes, your doubts and your bad knee: after all, you owned her and you knew what was best. Many of us had no such tales and did not want to fabricate them, so we opted out; but opting out was opting out of manhood.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;"> We don't tell our stories of man and woman in the same way we did sixty years ago, which is why some of the classics embarrass us in our affection. In <i>The Bishop's Wife, </i>it hurts </span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;">to watch Carey Grant and David Niven toss Loretta Young through hoops. "Fight for her," says the angel to the bishop, but no one asks <i>her</i> what <i>she</i> wants. And I flinch, in the coda of <i>Casablanca</i>, as Bogart mansplains to </span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Bergman that "Someday you'll understand . . . . if that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it." <i>It's all for the best, little woman, I've got man's work to do, so go along now with the other guy. </i>Oh well.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> We're trying -- I and the people I know, work with, befriend and love -- to figure out a better way of living with each other. There are still glass ceilings and pay differentials, harassments and intimidations, but I think sometimes we succeed. </span><span style="text-indent: -1em;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Growing up is hard, and i</span></span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;">t can take many decades for a person or a society to learn the obvious. A joyous truth dawns on me, again and again: a woman, member of that other persuasion who are the majority of humankind, is first middle and and last a person. Rossano Brazzi was on the wrong track. My will to power, if I could find it, would not prove to be my most attractive feature. I've a good head of hair for my age, with a natural wave and hints of its original color, but the best things about me are my mind and my heart. They are only good, can only attract if I give them away. I've been learning: in life as in ministry, it's not about me. My best move is to listen, attend, breathe. I have to be present to that other person. This isn't easy, and I'm messing up right now as I write a thousand words about <i>me</i> and my <i>feelings.</i> Not in me or in the other, but somewhere on the other side of the membrane, beauty might arise. </span><i style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', serif; text-indent: -1em;"><span style="font-size: large;">My eyes</span></i><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;">, goes the joke, </span><span style="font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;"><i style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', serif; text-indent: -1em;">are up here</i><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: -1em;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;"> Beauty has no objective meaning, but is in the eye of the beholder, and relies therefore on a certain forgiveness. All bodies will prove hideous when viewed without limit or compassion, for in the rule of facts we are all just sacks of bone and meat, blood and worse. God pronounced the world </span><i style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', serif; text-indent: -1em;"><span style="font-size: large;">tovah</span></i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;">, beautiful, as God created it, but put the human beings in the world, male and female, for </span><i style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', serif; text-indent: -1em;"><span style="font-size: large;">shamar</span></i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;">, to watch over and keep it, well, beautiful. Beauty vanishes without attention, and thrives with tending.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;"> "I'll have what she's having." In <i>When Harry Met Sally</i>, </span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;">Rob Reiner asked if men and women can be friends, and Harry thinks no, because sooner or later the man will want to "nail" the woman. But this is a love story, and before it ends we learn that Harry and Sally belong together because they were friends.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;"> How's this for a concept? Not every love is a love story; most, in fact, are not. But first things first. I wouldn't want to be in a love story with someone who wasn't my friend. </span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; text-indent: -1em;">Can men and women be friends? If they cannot then life is not worth living.</span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: -1em;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">*"My Body Doesn't Belong to You"</span></span><br />
<span style="text-indent: -1em;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="text-indent: -1em;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">**<i>Access Hollywood</i>, 2005</span></span><br />
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<span style="text-indent: -1em;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: "georgia" , "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I encourage readers to reply by clicking on the word "comment(s)" in the widget below.</span></span></div>
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Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-69214999270015974282017-06-01T00:18:00.002-04:002017-06-01T00:38:02.244-04:00college reunion<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">They don't understand, do they?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- <i>Our Town</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Look you, the stars shine still.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- <i>The Duchess of Malfi</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I fear reunions. I fear a flood of grief and regret.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Grief not for wildness of youth, scrapes and escapades long gone and not to be revived. There were no scrapes. There was no wildness.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Primary narrative for a preacher's kid: a joy-riding car-wrecking dope-smoking wild-oats-sowing scourge, disciple of Marlon Brando on his loud bike, just bailed out at midnight by discreet arrangement in respect of the parson's position, an arrangement known across the town and in the pews by morning's light, and that is why the pastor's cheeks are burning as he ascends the pulpit. That was not my narrative. Sometimes I wish it had been. You hear how it lives in my imagination.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Mine was a second scenario, impulse curtailed and curdled, perfection imperfectly performed. Never arrested, never flunked out, never made anyone pregnant -- the clean slate that can bring no joy as an end in itself, but only as a modest flower on the vine of love. Paranoids have real enemies, and the lonely are not always to be pitied. Good grades at the prep school down the street appeased the parents, covering many sins of omission. If you are a "good kid" and no athlete, your grades are all most people want to know. Buttoned down, consumed in fantasies that rarely intersected with the world. More conversant with ancient characters of drama than with persons of my age, my sentences too long and lexicons no longer current, I was so old in youth, bitter in isolation.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And there was always an enemy, someone I was angry at and appointed chief wrecker of life. If that villain had only not done this or that to me . . . I thought life would then be good. Not that I had an idea what good life would be, too busy defending myself against real slings and imaginary arrows to look in other faces and wonder what behind their personae they were making of life, where their tender spots might be, how we might, or might not, have made a little bit of life together. Not a hot mess I was, but rather a cold one.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">So what I feel, setting foot again on hallowed grounds that once I failed to make my own, is not grief but guilt: for a sour virtue, acts undone, roads not taken, dice not thrown, conversations not started, confessions aborted, opportunities of growth tabled in self-pity and delayed to future decades. <i>What a jerk!</i> -- the refrain of a critical heart no longer proud of misery.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We only learn big lessons the hard way, and the longer we wait the harder is the way. It seems I have lived long enough, not having learned the easier way, to scissor up such scripts of anger and futility. Perhaps I do not need a script at all. I don't draw castles in the air and rage because they do not meet the ground. For half a decade now I've not had enemies. Well sure, there are people who make me angry, but it's not a cosmic thing. I get over it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I was of course saved, or I could not write this. There were those who, for whatever reason, reached down into the well and pulled me out. Some were friends of a year, or a decade; some were of a lifetime. Some were foolishly blind to my folly, and thought I was smart, or talented, or kind, or god help me good looking. And here's the simplest romance: when they put your newborn child into your arms, and she looks into your eyes saying <i>please save my life tonight</i>, you have to start growing up, whether you know how to or not. <i>Fake it till you make it</i> they say in showbiz and many other trades, including ministry.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And Carol, who gave me two babies and a half century of waiting for my adulthood, went to her fiftieth reunion at our college this year, and had a good time, and she commands me to go to my fiftieth reunion next year and also to have a good time. Perhaps, if I go, they won't remember what a jerk I was. Some of them at least. Maybe I'm not a jerk any more. Is that bar low enough? can I leap over it?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Do I really want to have been a bad kid? I'd rather be a good man. I'm not ambitious. I don't want to win anything. I'm not pursuing prizes or advancements. I'd like to be someone in whose presence living things can thrive.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I might turn out to be a younger, better old man than ever I was a young one. I hope. I think. I think I can. I <i>think</i> I <i>can</i>. . . .</span><br />
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I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below, and clicking on the word "comment(s)."Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-85581415355596688902017-05-31T23:55:00.001-04:002017-05-31T23:56:24.310-04:00friendship's requiem<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Certain small things/Touch nerve-lines to the heart.</span></span></div>
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- John O'Donahue, <i>To Bless the Space Between Us*</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Short lines</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Of an old fool for no one</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Who will read them</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Rest in peace</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">What did I hope for</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Anyway</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Really</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">What did I want really</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I wanted</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">wanted</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Every now and then</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I wanted every now and then</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Wanted to</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Wanted every now and then to do something nice</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Not so nice as you fear</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Not that nice</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Not nice that way</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Something small that you would like</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">That only you would like</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And only I could know you’d like</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And I alone could make for you.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A little work of hand and head</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A note a tone</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A tone of voice</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">to answer one of yours</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And yes I wanted</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">From you</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I wanted</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">From you</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Time to time</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">To hear you</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I wanted to hear you</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">from time to time</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The time the place the smell the heat</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The snap of where and when you are.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A little thing</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Nothing really</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I can do a lot with that</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A man of imagination I am</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I do a lot with nothing</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">With little</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">That’s my métier</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Too much perhaps with little</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Perhaps too little</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It’s in my wheelhouse</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">My scope of practice</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">My Modus Operandi</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Facio facere feci factus</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Do or make</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I make something of nothing</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Things of nothing</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I do a lot with little</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Not much</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Just a little something</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Nothing at all</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Is what I want</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Wanted because</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Out of nothing I make something</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A note a tone</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Not so much</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Nothing really</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Not so much to ask</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In return</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Return for</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A small thing but mine own</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">My soul</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Nothing much</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-48e68ff6-5092-dfef-7b4a-c1cdb2c452e3"></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The rest is silence</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">*(New York: Doubleday, 2008), p. 165</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I encourage readers to leave comments by clicking on the word "comment(s)" below.</span></span></div>
Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-15117197113348044202017-04-10T13:26:00.000-04:002017-04-10T13:28:01.601-04:00white bird<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Seventy years are given to us!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"> Some even live to eighty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">-- Psalm 90:10 (NLT)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Oh to be seventy again!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">-- attr. Georges Clemenceau</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">. . . a small white bird banging in my heart.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">-- Peter Meinke, "Poem to Old Friends Who Have Never Met"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The arithmetic is staggering. It staggers me. Today at about three in the morning I completed my seventh decade and -- get this! -- began an eighth. Doesn't seem right. When I say it out loud, my friends say surely that's wrong. But yes, I am living my eighth decade.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Older versions of scripture were more stately: "The days of our lives are threescore years and ten." In our age of vaccines and potable water and municipal sewer systems, the psalmist seems to bestow a right. I'm owed my seventy years, dammit, it's in one of those amendments somewhere. And if I don't get my threescore and ten then something has gone terribly wrong, so I'll retain legal counsel and there'll be an investigation to find out whose fault it is. Somebody has to be brought up on charges.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But entitled as I am to seven, an eighth decade seems to exceed my rights. I might finish it or I might not. The Constitution is silent about it. "Some even live to eighty . . . " how remarkable! how lucky!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And if you've already been blessed with a look into your medical future, if you feel on certain days the fatiguing race of medications through your body, if you know that other, more tiring chemicals are to follow and you know the name of your angel, you might see the next ten years as a contingent matter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I was widely praised a week ago for not doing much. It brings to mind the secret motto of counseling: <i>don't just do something; sit there!</i> I came late into two meetings, both of them emotional. In each meeting a team of clinicians were coaching someone through a difficult decision. I listened hard, because it took me the whole meeting to catch up. What were they talking about?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">By the time I figured out what the question was it had been answered and the team was leaving, and I stayed there with -- in one case the patient herself, in the other case a daughter who had made a hard decision. In both cases tears. In one the assurance that no, she wasn't about to die now, she had many days yet to live with us, and were proud how brave she was, to say that if her heart stopped she would not want resuscitation, would not want intubation. In the other case to say she really loved her mother, that her tears were the proof of how deeply, that the choice was a hard one with no clear answer, that we understood and would support her. In both cases a prayer to whatever it is that brings us here where we cannot bring ourselves, for the unearned gift that life is, for the chance to care about such things.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">That's all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I guess it worked.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">There was a shoutout on the company email, much praise.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Perhaps I am entering a phase of minimalism. Perhaps I operate on automatic pilot, accurate without decisions. You might say "instinct." You might say "experience." You might say "lazy." Maybe I am letting go of something. Maybe that's okay.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">It's a time to separate, and grasp other work. My heart is elsewhere. Where has it gone, <i>mi corazon</i>? Always a fool and now an old one, I can mess things up in that new territory where a small white bird flutters.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">There is fluttering around those who start out in the work, sent to me so I can clear some steps for them, watch them in their wobble and point to pits where they could fall. The holy terror, the impulse to flee and the command to stay in the room for another breath, with what cannot be fixed. Then the reduction of that inbreak to documents so ill-suited it's hard to say whether one makes a stream of gobble or a string of lies -- the soul's war between priest and bureaucrat. This watching, their looking back for confirmation, for some years now have been my chief joy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And now, even newer, the fluttering around those next to me, nurses and social workers and doctors and yes even managers, who under merciless pressure to produce numbers and protect posteriors, five or six or seven times a day send out their fragile emissary of compassion to broken places of the world, and then recall the shaken messenger before he can flame out -- in this my later stage I hear a call from them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">"Staff support" is in every chaplain's job description, and the job itself makes staff support impossible. In our work reports it's literally unrepresentable: unless I lie, it looks like goofing off. It's not another bloody meeting where, hell or high water, you staff will be supported by me the counselor and here's the agenda. It's not another complication in your schedule. It's my being with you. Maybe we talk about kids, or cats, or temples in Thailand, or John Cleese. Maybe it's you and me laughing till we choke with backstage jokery. Maybe it's me reminding you, or you me, that we don't deserve to be bullied.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">These are sweet things, and I am perfectly capable of botching them. They are still sweet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I encourage readers to leave comments by clicking on the word "comment(s)" below.</span></div>
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Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-57558218906327955382017-02-25T18:30:00.002-05:002017-02-26T09:37:45.885-05:00flat wrong<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- John Milton, "Areopagitica," 1644</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #111111;">. . . the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned</span><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia"; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">-- Stephen Miller, February 12, 2017</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia"; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia"; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia"; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">I don't know why there should be something rather than nothing, but there is something. If there were nothing, then I wouldn't be here wondering about it.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia"; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br /></span></span>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjvVCOpiqtV5oYgDznY0HiEvn8Q5ihLtI04UCxLqqpC_jK3spSBVH30sU6DjL8g2vIZJjwGAiYbC74msxOe5ZfH6FxV_qrsIUi7NVZtXOos6HZbLk82730-1hijmtoId1j4M1zFshVJTg/s1600/Asilomar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjvVCOpiqtV5oYgDznY0HiEvn8Q5ihLtI04UCxLqqpC_jK3spSBVH30sU6DjL8g2vIZJjwGAiYbC74msxOe5ZfH6FxV_qrsIUi7NVZtXOos6HZbLk82730-1hijmtoId1j4M1zFshVJTg/s400/Asilomar.jpg" width="198" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Asilomar, Pacific Grove, CA, 2/19</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia"; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">And there is truth, for without truth there would be nothing. The Something is what it is no matter what we think of it. The earth is not round today and flat tomorrow, depending on someone's opinion. Or someone's belief. Or someone's faith. Earth is there, exerting itself against us in a characteristic way. If it did not have a character, it would be nothing.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia"; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">Ever since there were sailors, it was known that the earth is round. Sailors know that the other ship disappears "over the horizon" not by becoming too small to see but by sinking beneath the curve of ocean.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia"; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">There are those who say the earth is flat, but they are wrong. Flat wrong. To maintain their false opinion they must bury themselves away, not just from theoretical predictions and scientific data but from ordinary human experiences as well; and when their little dungeon crumbles and the voice of truth breaks in again, they will have to flee again. If there is no place left to run to, they might resort to violence. Ignorance is essentially aggressive.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The American faith in Milton's "free and open encounter" of thoughts is so severe that to a surprising extent we tolerate ignorance, with all the dangers that such toleration poses. We don't imprison people for speaking falsehoods, unless we can prove they have done serious and deliberate harm. We judge falsehood however, and judge it hard. If you say the earth is flat, you lose credibility. What else, I think, are you deluded about? Perhaps your bank balance is another article of your faith. Should I accept a check from you?</span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Flat-Earthers do not possess alternative truth. They are wrong. And potentially dangerous. Though the American principle extends to them a right to be wrong, we retain the right to question them. If they respond to our questions by fighting and lying, there are penalties to be paid.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Ignorance is essentially aggressive and potentially dangerous, but then we're all ignorant, aren't we? Truth exceeds the capacity of any of us. No one can own it. Despite our years and diplomas, you and I can only claim to have traversed a small part of Truth's expanse, and that is why we must discipline our ignorance. We must expect to be questioned, and when questioned we must provide answers. Stand and deliver -- the deepest commandment of civil society.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia";">Emerson drew knowledge as a series of circles on the surface of Truth, each superseded by a larger one containing it. My first circle is the sweep of my eye over the horizon. I expand my knowledge by rambling outside of the circle's limits, or I expand it by climbing to a higher altitude from which a larger circle is visible. </span><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia";">I see within my world the tiny circle of the flat-earther, w</span></span><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">ithin which the world might as well be flat.</span><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I see all around that circle its contradictions. Driving from here to the </span><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">hardware</span><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> store, taking the subway to midtown, one sees no sign of earth's curvature. But if one flies to Europe, the aircraft follows a Great Circle route that looks like nonsense on a flat map. I see this and am wise, and yet, from the wilds of some even Greater Circle, who watches me and knows me for a fool?</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The wider the circle, the greater its territorial claim on Truth; but no circle is final -- "Around every circle another can be drawn." And so goes the progress of mind, of heart, of what we might with fear and trembling call civilization. The earth that looked so flat is revealed, when we go to sea or climb the air, to be round. The round rock spins and reels around a star. Our powers for good and evil expand.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There is of course resistance. As we build the larger circle, we invest in our carpentry; we don't like it when some yokel, whippersnapper shouts "False!" before the plaster dries. We wanted to enjoy our larger limit for a while, take some credit, receive the plaudits of a grateful nation. We don't want to see our drywall knocked down for some other dimension of which we had no notion. And yet it's that, or start to obsolesce. The rot on the vine begins.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Or more terrifying yet, we could start to defend our corrupted position, build the wall higher and thicker, send armies to defend against the threat of Truth, not only as it masses on the outside, but as it undermines and bubbles up on the kingdom's interior. In this way tyranny breaks out, a deadly plague to which nations are prone, but to which churches and political parties, families and social classes are susceptible as well.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The United States of America -- my beloved country -- is not a kingdom. No one gets to say, "This is the last circle!" It was designed by people who intimately knew the human lust for power, were aware that those who seize it almost never give it up unless compelled to do so. They invented something that changed the world -- the peaceful non-hereditary transition of power. They knew that no one has the whole truth, and they symbolized it in divided government; no one has the whole of power. They permanently divided power in a much-abused scripture called Constitution. Those who love America hold sacred the nation's separations of power.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the America whose documents I learned by heart as a child, and to which I have pledged allegiance thousands of times, no one gets the last word. No one. Particularly that ill-paid employee we imprison in a White House four years at a time to do our dirty work for us. That public servant's word may be first, but will never be final. God help us we are only human, and the endless conversation is our only salvation.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #111111; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A few days ago, deluded King Heffalump put one of his courtesans on TV to declare that no one can limit his power, or his proclamations. (No, I don't mean "courtier.") There was a revelation: we all saw how hostile to America, its people, its laws and its values were both the serpent and his master. Go back, sonny boy, sad herald with threadbare tights and kazoo for a trumpet, to the one who sent you. In the United States of America you have constitutional rights, but deserve no respect.</span></div>
Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-34684663512886790912017-01-08T11:41:00.001-05:002017-01-08T16:45:09.066-05:00unclean lips<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Who am I to buy the communion wine?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Annie Dillard*</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The most annoying thing about God, if scripture can even metaphorically be trusted, is that God forgives sins.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Forgiveness is unfair. You mean the idiot who cut me off at the exit, the broker who lied about the interest rate, the friend who won't talk to me for <i>no good reason</i>, the boss who <i>won't stop interfering</i>, these people don't owe me something, don't have to pay for their transgressions? When killers pose behind badges, when pastors counsel violence, when the mogul steals the widow's mite, are there no marks in the Book of Life? As a Universalist I'm supposed to imagine a banquet at the end of time to which all souls have been invited, but I balk at the scene where Slobodan Milosevic asks me to please pass the potatoes. I'm far from perfect, but I know I didn't orchestrate a six-figure ethnic murder. <i>What's that guy doing here? </i>I ask the host. What happens to justice when sins are forgiven?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But it's even more inconvenient when my own sins are forgiven. It blows my comfy perfectionism out of the water. Here am I, cultivating my woeful inadequacy, itemizing the reasons why I don't deserve to be good, secure in the knowledge that I am not fit to make the world better, listening to the long and weary list of sordid investments from which is born my presence on the earth, checking my privilege, owning my social location, confessing my embeddedness in structures of injustice, testing myself in a never-ending list of "isms" by which my perspective can be found wanting because we cannot see from all perspectives at the same time -- and now something bigger than me, with an arm of wind, sweeps my iPad and my notebook and my ID badge off the table and out of the room, saying <i>it matters not, will you go?</i> I wasn't planning for this -- this was a scene that wasn't supposed to happen for a good long time, in some future when I am finally ready and there's nothing wrong with me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I've been having this bromance with Isaiah.**</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The greatest <i>torah</i> (instruction) I take from my work is that, whether I like it or not, I am accepted. I've passed through hundreds of thresholds, doors of a hospital room or an apartment, to sites of holy terror, places where there's someone who unlike me is really suffering, truly behind the eight-ball, and where others are suffering for them. Their eyes turn to me -- me, you understand -- and they want my help, as if I had some help in my briefcase. <i>If they only knew what an imposter I am.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">"Woe is me!" said Isaiah, "for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips." <i>What are you picking on me for? Don't you see how corrupt I am, how compromised my talents and how hopeless my situation? What do you want from me, who have to work with people like this? Find somebody better, wiser, more eloquent and well-connected, for god's sake! Find somebody . . . else.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And the seraph sweeps his inadequacy off the table, taking a live coal from the altar with a pair of tongs and touching the resistant mouth: "Your guilt is departed and your sin is blotted out." The voice from behind the seraph asks "Whom shall I send?" And the new prophet, doing the right thing after exhausting other possibilities, speaks the one remaining answer: "Send me." And this unclean man, from that moment, is "anointed." Not made perfect but authorized, dispatched, commanded -- to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to comfort those who mourn.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">An intern sat with a sleeping patient who slowly came awake. "I thought you were an angel," said the patient. "Made your day, didn't it?" I said to the intern later. But the threshold is lower than we think: an angel (<i>malak, angelos)</i> is just a messenger. The patient looked at her and got a message.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We Unitarians have no choice but to own the third president who declared himself one of us and wrote into history the principle that all persons are created equal, each with unalienable rights. That Unitarian was, now notoriously, a sinner. But there's not a one of us who can say they wish those words had not been written; or that they had not been written by an American; or that they had not been written by a Unitarian. The world's a stage, and the theatre teaches that each of us has a curtain and behind the curtain is a mess, but we have to get on with it and there's no time to clean house.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There's a Christian doctrine called Incarnation. It means that Yeshua -- Jesus as many call him -- wasn't pure. He was made of blood and guts, born (as an ancient father*** said) <i>inter faeces et urinam </i>to a penniless family of a despised people in an awkward corner of empire. And that is the glory of it. No matter what your view of the Jewish prophet crucified in Jerusalem, life's greatest astonishment is that humanity is no excuse.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It's not that I'm good enough. It's that I'm not good enough and sometimes it matters not.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">*<i>Holy the Firm</i> (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 63.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">**quotations from <i>Isaiah,</i> chapters 6 and 61 (NRSV)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">***Bernard de Clairvaux</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I encourage readers to leave comments by clicking on the word "comment(s)" below.</span>Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-76294138801686411732016-12-31T14:16:00.000-05:002016-12-31T15:52:10.776-05:00turn turn<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">. . . time for every purpose . . . </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>-- Ecclesiastes</i>, 3:1 (KJV)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">'Tis the old wind in the old anger.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- A. E. Housman, "On Wenlock Edge"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Racism has a new face. Or rather, turned its old one up again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">If you tell a racist he's a racist, he'll say damn right and hit you on the head with a two by four.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">If you tell a liberal he's a racist, he'll say, "Gosh I guess you're right, let's spend a truly miserable weekend thinking about it."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A decade ago, quarreling with my liberation theology professor, I wrote that racism had been driven underground, and the driving of it had been a great achievement. Racism is a sin, no more to be erased from the world than lust or greed or gluttony; but if we could construct a world in which our hateful and violent impulses, rather than parading down the middle of the street in gaudy underwear, could only flit in shadows of the alley, we would have done something for the future and for our children who must live in it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This is what we liberal religious believed, plausible at the time. We had loved the Huxtables, and in a year or two would send an elegant, unflappable, articulate and professorial black man to the White House. We turned therefore from confrontation with persons to confrontation with systems, and with ourselves.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We took stock of the categories and their demographics, and looked for ways to make the groupings look like America. Many advantaged groups have fewer persons of color than America as a whole (or none at all). Many disadvantaged groups have far more persons of color than America as a whole. It was clear that we should iron out the differences, particularly when those differences instantiate the divide of rich and poor, powerful and wretched. We didn't talk much, in these discussions, about the National Basketball Association or the African Methodist Episcopal Church, because they pose a question inconvenient for the leveling impulse: is it not possible that certain concentrations of race and culture instantiate the pride and nurturance of those with whom we would ally?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But we also took inventory of our selves. It's as if we thought that, if we stood for justice and yet perfect justice had not come, the reason for that imperfection must be imperfection in our souls. Fitting and proper that we should search ourselves for ignorances, assumptions of our limited experience, judgments written in pre-conscious experience; but if we wait for justice-work until there's nothing wrong with us we'll wait forever while the world burns. Taken too far, our soul-work is a narcissism. The zits of my spirit are just not that all-fired important.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We are, as my professor said, socially located. We are, as Mark Belletini said, embedded in radicalized structures. We are, as Christians say, all sinners. And we cannot wait.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">No immaculate conception for us, and no transfiguration, no seminar that makes us whole. Messy as we are, we talk and act, and take correction, and repent, and talk and act again. We'll blunder, and we'll misconstrue, and we'll forget and we'll ignore and we'll be our partial selves, confess and be forgiven, and orient again toward the greater purpose. That is the sacred life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When I was a teacher in the theatre I used to say, don't think about what's wrong with you. Your inadequacy will always be with you: Just think of it and there it is, staring you down, blocking your view. Look through it, to what you must see.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Racism and other abominations came out of the shadows last month. It isn't hiding any more, but marching down Main Street. It sings from the seat of power, and authorizes ministers to wreck the infrastructure of hope and opportunity. The malign sirens seduce one group of dispossessed to strike against the others, assuring the forever reign of those who have much, and plan soon to have more. Naked personal hatred is in the streets again, with flags and banners.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It's the old wind that knocks us sideways, in the old anger. The year turns tonight. Let's turn into the wind.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I encourage readers to leave comments, by clicking on the word "comment(s)" below.</span>Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-84510428960510716602016-12-24T17:23:00.001-05:002017-04-02T15:35:18.835-04:00jahr zeit<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">. . . ora pro nobis peccatoribus . . . </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Chanticleer empowered Christmas again this year by singing at a great New York City Church, and of course they performed the Franz Biebl <i>Ave Maria</i>, a piece I never knew until I heard them sing it twenty years ago but is now compulsory for them and obligatory for me. I am not a Marian theologian, but when those twelve guys sing of the mother who will stand by us now and at the last hour, my bones melt. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">December is <i>illud tempus. </i>All the times and all years recur. Deploying the same lights and pendants, the same museum store stars and snowflakes and angels (plus one new of each) on a new tree, I suspend the course of life on those branches, and see what I have lost and gained, given and received. A ledger of credits and debits, from times long ago and recent.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A day boy could leave my prep school early if he didn't have a sixth period class. On those days I might walk home. Or I might call <b>J</b> from the phone booth and, with her permission, walk to her front door.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><b>J </b>and her husband had been youth counselors in my dad's church. When they gave up the work, some of their friendships lasted. Now and then four of us day boys would gather in their parlor. But I had an arrangement of my own.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When <b>J</b> saw me at her front door she would put me to work. Her two daughters, of middle school and elementary age, would be home in a while, and later their dad, and then there would be a family dinner. But in the interval, maybe an hour, I worked in her kitchen, and I had her attention.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Over cutting boards and paring knives, baking sheets and measuring cups, there was no anguish or existential tremor. I spoke of teachers, assignments, intramural sports, the latest tiff with my father, and she heard me as if I were not the strangest and most unlikely boy, as if I might grow into something. She spoke of daughters and husband, the preschool where she worked in the mornings, and herself. We would pass the time, and as time passed she was showing me how to be in the room with her, and I was learning how to be a person in the world. I could not have said even to myself that I adored her. Once or twice she asked me to stay for dinner, but mostly when the daughters and their dad got home, it meant our time was over, and I walked home happy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In those days a girl of my age could crush me quick and hard without noticing, but this woman saw me, heard me, and didn't reach for the fly-swatter. She seemed to think I deserved my place and my time. It wasn't anything she said. She was herself the glad tidings. Later I would forget her teaching and regress, but the marker was there to be found again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A shrink asked me, what was in it for her? And I wonder. Perhaps among the aromas of her kitchen she whiffed my safely repressed testosterone. Perhaps beneath my chirp she heard the pedal-point of adoration. Perhaps a boy's obliviousness to shades of feeling brought moments of quiet to a mother of girls. Perhaps she was curious what it would be like to raise a boy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Or perhaps . . .</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In my work I now and then meet a client who makes me think <i>this one is mine.</i> It's as if I have been sent by greater intelligence, because I'm the one who can help. I see where the wound is, and I know how to get to the sweet spot. No one else can do what I can do.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I met <b>E</b> in the hospital, raging that she had ever been brought there. Brilliant, peremptory, not to be trifled with. A white northeastern Episcopalian intellectual. A woman psychiatrist in a time when you couldn't be nice, you had to break the ceilings with your own head. I saw all this, and I knew where the sweet spot was.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><b>E</b> died for five years, holding court from her couch, bored and scared, vaping a cloud and soaking herself in Bushmill's Irish, fussing with her home attendant, wishing she could believe in afterlife, wondering what dying would feel like. She had given up her profession, and as macular degeneration took her sight away she could not work and she could not read. She grieved for and could not recreate the life of her mind.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Most every week I would come to <b>E</b>'s parlor on Central Park West. Five times I saw the cycle of seasons conceal and reveal the Sea of Onassis. She bore a grudge against certain trees whose summer foliage hid the lake, and would have cut them down by her own hand if she could.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">She wanted from me things that almost no one wants, things I put on the shelf when I go to work. My genteelly poor prep school culture, my easy reference to the Great Books and the lexicon of Classical Music. ("More Chopin than Schubert" was a phrase she would understand.) And she mined my seminary education. She wanted to know what "Incarnation" meant. And what a "Messiah" was. And what sort of place the "Kingdom of God" could be. And she didn't want church answers; she wanted to know what the original words were, and who had first written them, and what they thought they were talking about. I shared what little I knew. I revealed my growing conviction that Yeshua was, prior to Christian fantasies, a Jewish prophet preaching from the history of people who, unlike most historians, had lost everything, been reprieved, and wanted to do more good from their Second Temple than they had done from the First.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">She always said, "There was something I meant to ask you, but I forgot what it is." Which was funny. So I brought her music, and poems, and passages of philosophy. When we needed to know more, we would look stuff up on the internet. Sometimes I left her laughing. Sometimes I left her (a chaplain's tribute) peacefully asleep.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It was a long rough ride, but I was glad tidings for her. And she was glad tidings to me, because she wanted from me the thing that is hardest to bear: intellect. She wanted me to help her figure out the answers. I couldn't bring the answers, but I could bring her the life of the mind.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A colleague asked me, what was in this for you? And noting that <b>E</b> had two daughters but no son, he suggested that she was a kind of mother to me, who could follow the racing of a smart son's brain and desired it for herself. I had known when I met her that the sweet spot was a place I could fill, and I had said, <i>this one is mine</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And perhaps, so long ago, <b>J</b> scanned for my sweet spot and said, <i>this one is mine</i>. This is all my fancy. I could not ask the question I would ask now of a friend: how am I doing? what are you getting from this?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I think of <b>J </b>and <b>E</b>, two mothers of daughters borrowed for an hour at a time, one from my youth and one from my ancientness but about the same age. Their gifts to me are perennial, and I cannot repay such debts unless I pay them toward the future. Though I am timeless, the world grows younger every day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">About this time last year, my borrowed moms both died. I hope they know how much I love them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And love I wish for you;</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">May you give it frequently.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Charles Stephen, Jr. "Some Wishes for You"*</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I don't like wishing generic holidays. Christmas is what I know and what I have to give. So I wish you Merry Christmas whether you like it or not.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">*<i>The Gift of the Ordinary: a Meditation Book,</i> (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1985), p. 10.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I encourage readers to leave comments by clicking on the word "comment(s)" below.</span><br />
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<span id="goog_1599481940"></span><span id="goog_1599481941"></span>Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-30668452477578382332016-11-20T14:34:00.001-05:002018-01-14T12:38:51.287-05:00go boom<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(29, 33, 41); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18.5px; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Get up, child.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Pull your bones upright.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-kerning: none; font-size: large;">-- Audette Fulbright Fulson, "Prayer for the Morning"*</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Not in the morning. In the late afternoon. Walking in the neighborhood. On an errand.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Carol taught me. When the baby falls down and looks at you, you must show that you saw it happen. <i>Oops</i>, you say. The baby is picking herself up, looking at the elbow, the knee, touching the place, trying to characterize the catastrophe. <i>Fall down go boom</i>, you say. <i>Want me to kiss it?</i></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Maybe it's enough that you witnessed and proclaimed the hurt: <i>oops</i>, and then the child forgets and moves on, but maybe she needs the more specific intervention, comes to you, and you kiss the spot. <i>OK?</i> the baby runs back to her play, sooner or later to fall again. She learns the routine. One days she falls, says <i>oops</i>; looks at you and says (you repeat after her), <i>fall down go boom.</i> She laughs, and runs on.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Sometimes, of course, there are material injuries. More is required than words: a cleaning of the wound and a band-aid. Or -- god forbid -- the rare but constantly feared trip to the emergency room. And yet most of the time it's a matter of management: own the hurt, assess the damage, repair if necessary, move on.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">But there's a limit to this blessing. Some day I'll be a danger to myself when I go walking, though I don't think this was that day. But I'll have a good long chance to think about it, as people react to my trivial wound, impossible to conceal. A certified wounded healer I am now</span>.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-4qotbbphoWqyoGXnSARn-5UZkzWXwUCDzFXUqypBsd-Fx-bCQI_HFm-Wfi1x2NlexdqpWmzXWhJLVDXrKNaUFv5vRy-gmUHm0-l8EMrrcFYbc0PpE58Pt1Cel9kXbiglQ2IrkBF9Lyc/s1600/injury+copy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-4qotbbphoWqyoGXnSARn-5UZkzWXwUCDzFXUqypBsd-Fx-bCQI_HFm-Wfi1x2NlexdqpWmzXWhJLVDXrKNaUFv5vRy-gmUHm0-l8EMrrcFYbc0PpE58Pt1Cel9kXbiglQ2IrkBF9Lyc/s320/injury+copy.JPG" width="240" /></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I went boom yesterday. Just walking in the late afternoon. Crossing a quiet street. Coming up to the curb, where it dips to nothing for passage of wheelchairs and shopping carts. Coming up to the curb, where it dips to nothing, right where there was no curb. A collision path with concrete. Coming at me, too quick to stop. Almost at the same time, hands, forehead, chin, glasses on the sidewalk. <i>Oops. Ow.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Damage reports. I'm still conscious. Glasses OK. Good. I put them back on my nose, I stand up. I put my hand to my forehead, then look at my fingers. A little blood.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A man comes up to me. You OK? <i>Fall down go boom.</i> I think so, am I bleeding (meaning am I bleeding a lot?) One spot on your chin, he says. I feel for the spot. Again a drop of blood. You want me to call an ambulance for you? No, I think. No, I say. I'll just go home (can't just pick up the cleaning now, can I?) Where do you live? Just the next street (not able to explain this as simply as I wanted to). Thank you, I say.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I'm steady on my feet (but now I wonder if I'm steady as I think). I'm wondering if my shirt will be all covered with blood by the time I get home, but the blood doesn't come in torrents. I'm just going to bruise and have ugly scrapes. I clean the wound with alcohol -- <i>ow</i> -- and look at the meaty mess of my face in the mirror. You should have seen the other guy, I'll say.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I've had a fall incident. I fell and hurt myself for no good reason. I'm getting old. Am I a fall risk? If you're labelled a fall risk, you can't go anywhere by yourself: that's the rule with our clients.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I take my history. Every few years I have a fall, sometimes spectacular. I once tripped and rolled over the landscaping border of a building before limping in to see a client who lived there. In San Francisco a dozen years ago I took a movie-worthy somersault from the curb across a street and stood up on the median with only a tiny scrape on the back of my hand. In a play reading in Chicago I sat in a chair too close to the platform edge, fell three feet and backrolled to my knees, picked up and continued. I take little injury from these incidents, and I attribute that invulnerability to my theatre training -- I have the practiced, subconscious skill of rolling and distributing weight.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But this time was different. The concrete was too fast for me. <i>Ow</i>. No rolling, just whip of my body, head at the end. <i>Smack.</i> I'm not as smart as I think I am, but that's hardly news. Just a reminder.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the last year I've had a remission of arthritis, and rediscovered the workings of the knee joint. I've had good control of my sickness. I've felt like a youngster of fifty-five.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In my life, my city, my work, I can count on a lot concern and compassion (maybe more than I want). But lots of us are injured and can't count on compassion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There's an injury many of us have received, a moral and spiritual injury -- an injury that we must heal and yet strategically conceal. We know we must own the hurt. We have fallen and gone boom. Some time is due. We can't move on without knowing what we move on from. We show our hurt to each other. <i>Want me to bless it?</i> Show it to the Spirit, to God the great and compassionate observer. If cleaning, stitching, bandages, emergency surgery are due, do what is needed. This is our homework. Do it at home.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But when we go into the world, let's not front our wounds. The forces let loose are not threatened by wounds, have only hatred for bandages and expressions of pain. "Empathy" is an obscene word for them. They throw parties because we are hurting. Micah tells us the Lord demands only that we make justice and do kindness, and walk humbly with the Spirit of Peace.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So go back into the playground, and threaten them with your justice. Speak the truth. Tell the stories. Claim your rights, and the rights of the bullied. Call out the bullies. Undermine their ideology of the fist. Hear the pain of those who chose this dream -- </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">fall down go boom</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> -- and ask them how they chose it, for they are victims. I call myself out here, for I don't know whether I am brave enough. I guess I'll be finding out.</span></span></div>
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*available at uua.org</div>
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Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-15601728787148083182016-11-16T23:07:00.002-05:002016-11-16T23:22:20.549-05:00banana states<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The people will waken, and listen . . .</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">- "Paul Revere's Ride"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I want to talk about other things, but I have to say this first.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I'm walking on the grounds of a retreat center in Ohio. I'm one of the first to get here. I have the garden to myself. The trees are gone brown, and most of the leaves have fallen. The garden has a brick wall but I do not feel enclosed, for the garden is on a slope, and I feel uplifted toward the hills around us. It is so, so quiet. How we can be so tucked away from flight paths and interstates I do not know, but of course I still have airplane ears -- the ringing silence that comes from decompression and partial recovery. Perhaps there is background noise that, in my stunned condition, I do not hear.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Ah yes, there is a nearby railroad. The sound of the train is very clear. It comes and then it goes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We are gathering -- clergy of my disorganized faith -- as we do each November to draw each other out of ministry's prosaic miseries. We distract ourselves from the miseries by studying some question, chosen at the previous year's retreat. A year ago we chose <i>Dystopia</i>. We had no idea what our subject would mean when its day came around. One of us noted that now the day's newspaper would serve as dystopian literature.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Heffalump will take power. His closest advisor is a white nationalist. He has promised to jail the opposition, to punish journalists who don't sing his song, to send occupying armies into communities of color, to send brownshirts after those who speak freely, to wall the nation off from the world, to impose religious tests on citizenship, to wage trade war against the markets into which we sell, to abandon European alliances while bombing the excrement out of any region of the world from which danger may come. These are the Heffalump's promises, recorded for history. I take him at his word. If he doesn't do these things, the <i>Heffalistas</i> will have his Heffahead.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">From each of us our parish, our flock, our clients and colleagues demand comfort. But we have none to give. We are punched in the gut, gasping for breath and uncertain how long the oxygen will last. Grief work takes a while. And it begins with telling the truth. There is no emergence from grief without knowing that you will never be the same.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">There can be no more dystopian novels. I and my country are living a dystopia. The country I have loved as a child, or rather a super-empowered minority of my country, have chosen to reverse the moral progress of the last half century, and they vow to uproot my country's foundational values.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I'm the kind of kid who knew how you are supposed to fold the flag when you put it away. I'm the kid who memorized the Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution. I could sing all four verses of "The Star Spangled Banner." I knew the story of the virtuous war: I could tell you all the battles, the years and the places. I can still perform "Paul Revere's Ride" from memory, and when I come to a particular line at the end, my throat catches.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But the people are not woke. They think they have wakened, but there are dreams within dreams, and they have emerged only into another delusion -- that by killing the messengers they can prevent the danger. If the Heffalump keeps his promises, it will not turn out well for them. As a child I pledged allegiance to the United States, not the banana states, of America.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I've said it. I'm not important, and my statement has no historical value. I say these things not to change the world, but to clear my throat. Now I can move on.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">I encourage readers to leave comments by clicking on the word "comment(s)" below.</span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQCcKt1b55a8T9Mer9o8dbwdBV9Pp-pnjU74hqUqpLgbvdiJNkZJMiM6fwZxZ3qsYL8UVnxxQ8OrsRZFRWcNMnRzmkbi158QQ6eQo8rCe2bBq6FQ0Yva-VmOw7q2rPtjX8hOTqTFxN7fQ/s1600/IMG_0235+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"></span></a><br />Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-65124354164337351652016-11-06T18:09:00.002-05:002016-11-07T23:27:38.047-05:00rough beast<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Naomi Shihab Nye, "Kindness"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">"Help, help, a Herrible Hoffalump! Hoff, hoff, a Hellable Horralump! Holl, holl, a Hoffable Hellerump!"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- A. A. Milne, "In Which Piglet Meets a Heffalump"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">. . . what rough beast . . . ?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Let's just call him The Heffalump. He has no kindness. He knows no sorrow. He throws it back on others, and makes them suffer for their pain.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Almost eight years ago ("falsetto prophecy," January 19, 2009), I wrote about the advent of a black president, who would the next day walk Pennsylvania Avenue. I had just been to Disney World and walked Main Street, and I thought Pennsylvania Avenue might at least that day be America's Main Street. "Isn't that what we've hoped for," I asked, "that we could all walk down Main Street together?" That was Disney's dream, and it's not all bad.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Two evenings from now I will learn who is going to make the next such walk. Like many Americans, I am not at ease about what may happen.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Perhaps one day we will walk Main Street together. Perhaps every now and then, in a Divine Domain, we already do. Perhaps on that one day we did so, and we must remember it. What we failed to predict was the reaction. We failed to understand how many of my countrymen would rather plough the street than walk with a black man; how many think a House no longer White if a father, mother and their ilk of color eat off the china; how many bilious hearts erupt because a man of negritude is their commander.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">An Emperor in a novel, who pined for the Republic and failed to restore it,* thought that poison would evoke its antidote, but of course it only poisoned everything. In our day also poisons have come out. We forgot how toxic was the hallowed ground we lived on, from which old ghosts would rise. We failed to see that a media company and a political party would burn the house down just to get the black man out of it, or just to get the eyes and votes of those who want the black folks out. The party and the network failed their first objective, but they sowed corrupting seeds. How current to parade fantasy as fact, threaten free speech, demean rules of evidence, reduce discourse to a jailhouse brawl! How respectable to impeach a president with a racist lie, and call it journalism! It doesn't take long to smash the standards. How many generations would it take to replace them?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I, my friends and my associates, my teachers and my students -- well, this wasn't our idea, but ours is a share of blame. We have reveled in false equivalencies, as if the fox and hens were equal opponents in the henhouse. We have been too tolerant of intolerance, too patient with aggression, too polite with brutality, too reasonable with unreason, too respectful of malice. We're wiseing up, but we're late to the contest. For these sins The Heffalump is our penance. Seekers of truth are sinners like everyone else, and truth is never known by human hearts but through a dark and partial glass; but those who live by killing truth don't belong at table with those who do their best to honor her. What possible conversation could there be? Jayson Blair is not a journalist, and neither was Andrew Breitbart.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The school in which I first was was educated had a Political Debating Club. This club trained us to argue an issue using evidence and inference, by rules of civility and logic. A debater was supposed to be able to argue both sides of a proposition. There was no shouting down the other team, or threatening the judges, or pounding the Bible, or making up falsehoods on the fly; these incivilities never happened, and would have been grounds for disqualification. Though the contest was an artifice, it taught that free speech has its rules.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Liberation is passionate, but cannot be undisciplined. "The expectation of rationality," wrote Michael Gerson recently, "is not elitism. Coherence is not elitism. Knowledge is not elitism. Honoring character is not elitism. And those who claim this are debasing themselves."** Liberation without Enlightenment is just another crank of the Vengeance Wheel -- at best. The assault on reason, even when well meant and carried out by radical professors, yields results we should get wise to. We've already had a president we could have a beer with. Now we might have a president who, while speaking for aggrieved people, would beat us up and throw us out of the bar, before turning his rage on the oppressed. Are we having fun yet?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Lucy</i> (or is it Lucius?) <i>you got a lot of 'splainin' to do</i>. My seminary taught me that a white straight Anglo-Saxon overeducated old man is in an odd position in relation to prophecy. I'm not supposed to man'splain, or straight'splain, or white'splain, or educated'splain, or knowledge'splain, or old'splain. But pretty soon somebody's got to do some 'splainin.' The fox is in the henhouse, and The Heffalump is in his limo, planning his slouch down Pennsylvania Ave. Two days from now we'll know if he gets his wish.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">*The Robert Graves version of Emperor Claudius, in <i>Claudius the God</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">**"Out of his Depth, Donald Trump Clings to Deception," The Washington Post (September 27, 2016), www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I encourage readers to leave comments by clicking on the word "comment/s" below.</span>Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8649564513654121333.post-40154838868139070742016-10-31T23:22:00.001-04:002016-11-01T00:59:50.680-04:00authentic words<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I often think of . . . liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- Annie Dillard, <i>Holy the Firm*</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">words, words, words</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">-- <i>Hamlet, </i>II. ii.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I'm figuring out how to write. Been figuring it out most of my life. Most of the time I was wrong.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Why do I care?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It seems like a fight with myself. Or maybe a fight for myself. Maybe a quest. To find. Discover. Become. What? the thing I'm going to be when I actually exist. When I grow up. Yes, that's the ticket, when I grow up then I'll be a real boy, and then I can drive the car and operate machinery and order a martini, and when I speak people will listen, o yes then I won't be just a kid, I'll be the real thing, a genuine article.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Genuine. True. Authentic. Yes, that's the word. Authentic. At least, it's the word I've been using the last couple of years. The word that, when someone I trust applies it to me, turns on my water-works. The word by which I can be manipulated. "You're strange, but you're authentic." The key to my heart.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I've pursued this thing in three ways. I tried to live in the theatre some way for a quarter century. More recently I've spent a decade being formed as a counselor. But all my life I've been trying to write, even when I couldn't.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">People ask me how I came from the theatre to counseling, as if it were a contradiction, and I say that they're two different searches for authenticity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In a theatre you pretend that you're worth looking at, and if you pretend truly they look at you. The main thing is honesty, fake that and you've got it made said many a sage. The semiologists teach us that every sign of truth can verify a lie. If you lift your eyebrow when you lie, stop lifting your eyebrow.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The best approach to truth in the looking-glass of illusion is the <i>via negativa. </i>Learn what's false and put it away. Repeat. Keep learning many falsehoods and putting them away. What's left is more likely to be true. And what is this falsehood, this truth, false or true to? To the thing, the place, the plot, the illusion at hand in the play, the <i>Spiel</i>, the <i>commedia, </i>the bit, the act. Take away what distracts from that, and we might have something.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I was trained to find the falsehoods in myself, the things I brought with me that were </span><i style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', serif;">not</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> the play, the </span><i style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', serif;">Spiel</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">, the </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-style: italic;">commedia</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i> -- </i>m</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">y assumptions, attitudes, neuroses parasitically feeding off the terror of the stage, obscuring the authentic illusion. Learn what's false. Put it away. Repeat.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In counseling, we track our attachments and antipathies: is the client before me just like my sweet old auntie? the mother I wish I had? the cheater who betrayed me? We also track the attachments and antipathies of the client toward ourselves: am I in their eyes a son? a lost husband? a huckster who sold nostrums? We learn, with the help of our teachers, to notice and disarm, contain, bracket these transferences and counter-transferences. We note our assumptions: we're too fast or slow, too loud or soft, too white or <i>nouveau ethnique -- </i>we name these patterns to get a handle on them, lift them out of the way so that the client's truth will shine. Learn what's false. Put it away. Repeat.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And words demand their own authenticity. I was brought up among books, not just picture books but big thick books jammed with print, books in many languages, books that I knew were for the grownups and not for me yet and therefore sooner or later but not much later I would grow into. I was also brought up among poems and songs, rhymes and rhythms of speech -- olympic vocabulary contests, spoonerisms and puns.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Language seemed like a road from childhood to adulthood. The shy boy might come out into the world on a thruway of words. Writing seemed a way of being somebody. But who was the shy boy to be?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">At first you try on many voices, like old clothes in a thrift store. Scripture, Milton, Orwell, Kerouac, Frost, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Joseph Conrad, John Steinbeck, the bard . . . And then you discover how your sentence lights up on the fuel of anger. You turn all your school papers to rage so that your prose can burn with a hard light. You're a sullen, secretly angry person. Angry is happy. Angry is real. You're trying to grow up, but you're stuck in adolescence, because if you can't be shouting at the elders, the system, the cosmic conspiracy to irritate you, then you can't find the words.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Then you grow up into the academy, where you're supposed to write, but in a particular way. A man who had never published taught me how to write for academic publication. When I had absorbed his teaching, I was silent for a decade, for he took my voice away. If the words had to follow those rules, they would not come to mind. I could not find the words. No words about the shifts and shadows, wisps and breaths, of theatrical illusion -- which in those days was what I had to write about. If I was to write at all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Then came the deconstructionists -- the imitators of a French philosopher whose greatest horror was <i>ism </i>of any kind -- and every article in every humanistic field must be written in a tangle of neologisms: clunking cinderblock terms that, if dumped into one's writing, were proofs of currency and profundity. The new vocabulary was the certified antidote for logocentrism, phallocentrism, colonialism, imperialism, and hegemonic aggression. So powerful were these words that I adopted them myself. I rewrote my drafts in fast imitation of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, and became a published scholar. I had learned the power of those words.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I'm not a scholar. I started this project eight years ago, and I don't have to please anyone but myself. I just have to keep it honest. I'm doing better than I've done before, the proof being that I can look at some of those entries from eight years ago without feeling ill. I'm pursuing authenticity, hunting down extraneous words and syllables and letters, striking out the things I don't really have to say, eschewing explanation that obscures the thought. It's <i>via negativa</i>. Find what's false. Put it away. Repeat.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I dropped out for a year, but it wasn't a good year. It was a year when I got tired and sick, and let the job overpower the work. I had to give myself a shake, and get back to the task. The last few months are a new thing, closer to the bone, with firmer adherence to life and to death. <i>Behold! I'm doing a new thing, don't you see it?</i> said the Lord in Isaiah's prophecy. But it's the same thing, always new. Find what's false. Put it away. Repeat.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: medium;">*(New York: Harper Colophon, 1977), p. 59.</span><br />
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<br />Hollis Hustonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06845589214006531984noreply@blogger.com1